PSO-BELBIC scheme for two-coupled distillation column process

In the two-coupled distillation column process, keeping the tray temperatures within a specified range around their steady state values assures the specifications for top and bottom product purity. the two-coupled distillation column is a 4 input/4 output process. normally, control engineers decouple the process into four independent loops. they assign a pid controller to control each loop. tuning of conventional pid controllers is very difficult when the process is subject to external unknown factors. the paper proposes a brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (belbic) to replace conventional pid controllers. moreover, the values of belbic and pid gains are optimized using a particle swarm optimization (pso) technique with minimization of integral square error (ise) for all loops. the paper compares the performance of the proposed pso-belbics with that of conventional pso-pid controllers. pso-belbics prove their usefulness in improving time domain behavior with keeping robustness for all loops.