A Rapid Control Prototyping System Design for Temperature Control of Plastic Extruder Based on Labview

In order to verify the performance of the designed temperature controller of the plastic extruder using supercritical CO2, we developed a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation system. The specified HIL simulation system was founded upon the NI products, while the temperature controller and its accessorial parts were constructed in Matlab/Simulink environment. Labview and Simulink were combined together with NI Simulation Interface Toolkit (SIT), and a friendly Human Machine Interface (HMI) was developed and implemented in the host computer by using TCP/IP protocol for data communication. The result showed that the designed temperature control algorithm had better effect when used in the plastic extruder production field. This HIL simulation system can shorten the development cycle and cost, improve the design level of the control system, and provide a solution to the demonstration of the controller in the real-time mode. Meanwhile, the HMI solved the problem of real-time monitoring in the process of the HIL simulation. What's more, this simulation system can be applied in other process control fields as flow, pressure, etc.