• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.129-136
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• 2018

In this contribution, the control of multivariable reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plant using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers is presented. First, feed-forward compensators are designed using simplified decoupling method and then the PID controllers are tuned for flux (flow-rate) and conductivity (salinity). The tuning of PID controllers is accomplished by minimization of the integral of squared error (ISE). The ISEs are minimized using a recently proposed algorithm named as teacher-learner-based-optimization (TLBO). TLBO algorithm is used due to being simple and being free from algorithm-specific parameters. A comparative analysis is carried out to prove the supremacy of TLBO algorithm over other state-of-art algorithms like particle swarm optimization (PSO), artificial bee colony (ABC) and differential evolution (DE). The simulation results and comparisons show that the purposed method performs better in terms of performance and can successfully be applied for tuning of PID controllers for RO desalination plants.