Application of a sliding mode controller to a cooling tower

In this work a real implementation of a Sliding Mode Controller based on a FOPDT model of the system is established, the Sliding Mode Controller uses a PID algorithm as the sliding surface. The Sliding Mode Controller is implemented in an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The implementation allows controlling an exothermic process, cooling tower, for research and teaching purposes. The Sliding Mode Controller is programmed and then applied to the actual process. The proposed scheme is compared with a PI controller; and the IAE performance index is used to compare the results of both the computational simulations, made with Matlab®, as well as the implementation work. Under the experiments, the sliding mode controller showed an improvement of up 25.85% with respect to the classical PI.