English

Design of the PID temperature controller for an alkaline electrolysis system with time delays

Systems and Control 2022-10-04 v1 Systems and Control

Abstract

Electrolysis systems use proportional-integral-derivative (PID) temperature controllers to maintain stack temperatures around set points. However, heat transfer delays in electrolysis systems cause manual tuning of PID temperature controllers to be time-consuming, and temperature oscillations often occur. This paper focuses on the design of the PID temperature controller for an alkaline electrolysis system to achieve fast and stable temperature control. A thermal dynamic model of an electrolysis system is established in the frequency-domain for controller designs. Based on this model, the temperature stability is analysed by the root distribution, and the PID parameters are optimized considering both the temperature overshoot and the settling time. The performance of the optimal PID controllers is verified through experiments. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the before-stack temperature should be used as the feedback variable for small lab-scale systems to suppress stack temperature fluctuations, and the after-stack temperature should be used for larger systems to improve the economy. This study is helpful in ensuring the temperature stability and control of electrolysis systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.00801,
  title  = {Design of the PID temperature controller for an alkaline electrolysis system with time delays},
  author = {Ruomei Qi and Jiarong Li and Jin Lin and Yonghua Song and Jiepeng Wang and Qiangqiang Cui and Yiwei Qiu and Ming Tang and Jian Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.00801},
  year   = {2022}
}