A large-scale experimental, state of the art storage facility was constructed on the Macdonald Campus of McGill University. This storage facility will serve as a tool to further investigate many of the laboratory experiments performed in agricultural and food science topics, by providing a representation of actual storage facilities in use in the industry today. The storage facility was fully instrumented to provide valuable data of the stored commodity and it's environment. A custom control software was developed with a user friendly graphical interface. This fully automated software allows data acquisition and control of temperature and relative humidity of the experimental storage facility. / Experiments were performed and the control software provided an adequate temperature and relative humidity control. The controller was based on a conventional PID or proportional, integral and derivative controller. To further improve the control of the storage facility, a novel multivariable PID controller was developed using enthalpy as the process variable, which encompasses both temperature and relative humidity. The novel controller was tested using a mathematical model developed. Simulations were performed comparing the performance of the novel multivariable controller to two other conventional controllers. The results demonstrate that the novel multivariable PID controller is capable of controlling temperature and relative humidity better than the other two conventional control techniques.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.31268 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Markarian, Naro R. |
| Contributors | Landry, J.-A. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001809437, proquestno: MQ70464, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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