On-Line, Auto-Tuning Regulation of Electronic Expansion Valve for Evaporator Control

In this paper, we report some results of a research project aimed at deriving simple, high-performance, adaptive and robust control algorithms for evaporator control by means of EEV (Electronic Expansion Valve). Control design is performed by resorting to a detailed, virtual prototyping environment described in [1]. The proposed control scheme has two nested loops. The inner loop consists of the process and a feedback PID controller. It is assumed that the structure of the process model is specified but with unknown parameters. The outer loop updates the parameters of the PID controller, on the basis of the results of a system identification procedure. Performance of the proposed controller is evaluated in the virtual prototyping environment by means of simulations.