The Use of Anti-Windup Techniques in Didactic Level Systems: An Interesting Application

Living in the age of technology and industrial evolution, automation applications are increasingly used and more necessary, either to improve the quality of a product or even cheapen some processes. Methods of Proportional, Integral and Derivative (PID) (such as its variants) tuning controllers have been much discussed due to their effectiveness. Taking this into consideration, the proposed work aims to improve the level controller in PD3 SMAR didactic plant. This level system always presents actuator saturation which leads to overshooting of the controlled response, decreasing the quality, consequently. To avoid this problem, the Back-Calculation Anti-Windup technique was considered. The Proportional and Integral (PI) control was performed directly at the plant via MATLAB software. The results showed that the use of Anti-Windup techniques became useful and reliable in systems where the actuator saturation was strongly present.