Compensation of Valve Stiction Using Nonlinear Controller Optimized with PSO Algorithm

Industrial processes such as oil, gas, petrochemicals, steel, and cement heavily rely on precise fluid transfer between vessels. Valves are critical components in these systems. While technological advancements have enabled automated valve control, challenges persist in valve actuators due to some nonlinear factors, such as stiction. This paper investigates the impact of stiction on valve actuator performance. A stiction model, incorporating disturbances, will be developed and transformed into a state-space representation. Subsequently, an optimized backstepping controller, enhanced by particle swarm optimization (PSO), will be designed to address this nonlinearity. The valve's influence on the actuator will be modeled as a constant torque. By considering the system's internal dynamics, a stabilizing controller will be developed to ensure system stability across all dynamic states. Lyapunov theory will be used to verify stability. MATLAB simulations will evaluate the controller's effectiveness in stabilizing the nonlinear stiction valve model and achieving the desired control performance.