Abstract:
The desalination process using the reverse osmosis technique is im portant for the production of drinking water, but its control is a great challenge due to its nonlinear and multivariable nature. In academia, the implementation of physical industrial processes represents a considerable cost, taking this into ac count, in recent years the technology has evolved and boomed called the "metaverse", where it is proposed to create a virtual representation of reality. This research work proposes a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) environment which con sists of a virtual reverse osmosis industrial process and designs and implements the control algorithm in a programmable logic controller (PLC), which is com mon in the industry. The system is versatile to implement different control algo rithms and opens the door to the use of different control devices for its imple mentation. The design methodology to be used consists of three sections. The first section is the mathematical model of the industrial process. The second sec tion is the implementation of the virtual process in Unity3D software. The third section is the implementation of two control strategies: Proportional Integral De rivative Control (PID) and Model-Based Predictive Control (MPC). Finally, a comparison of the performance of the implemented controllers for both the per meate flow variable ( F ) and conductivity ( C ), in transient and steady state, is performed.
