Electrical Electronics Engineering Projects,Thesis, dissertations and engineering Ebooks: PID Controller on FPGA for Temperature Control

The objective of this project was to implement a digital PID controller on an FPGA for a control application. We designed a controller to track and maintain a set point temperature of a water tank with lowest possible overshoot while maintaining maximum possible rise time. Multiple controllers and heaters were used to efficiently control the temperature. We used MATLAB to design our controller and develop a model of our system from experimental data. The heaters were driven using a PWM signal from the FPGA that was amplified using BUZ 73 transistors.
The motivation behind using FPGA to implement a PID controller rather than microcontrollers or DSPs is because it provides a good balance between performance and cost. Using microcontrollers, although they may be cheaper do not provide enough processing power to effectively perform complex calculations in real-time. Digital signal processors can implement complex algorithms quickly but are expensive.