Fuzzy based temperature control analysis for automotive air conditioning system

Abstract

Effective control of an Automotive Air Conditioning (AAC) system is complex since it deals with both heating and cooling as a result of the fixed or single temperature setting. The existence of steady-state error (SSE) is common in many climate controls models such as in the Stateflow switching controller in Matlab Simulink. This paper aims to develop an automatic temperature control scheme for the AAC system using the type I Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC). It also analyzes the AAC system response by simulating the fuzzy control algorithm in Matlab Simulink; the FLC design goal is to minimize the undershoot in the PID based control of the climate control model while maintaining the desired temperature with real time response. To assess the performance of the proposed system, a simulation was set up to match a range of user-specified reference temperatures (15°C, 20°C and 25°C). The obtained simulation results revealed that in contrast to a PID controlled AAC system, the proposed FLC based system reduced the undershoot to only 2.33% from a 33.33% observed from the PID based system.