Real-time IMC-PID Control and Monitoring of Essential Oil Extraction Process Using IoT

Essential oils are also known as natural oils which widely used in aromatherapy and personal beauty care. It has the advantage of helping to protect our body and homes from pathogens attack. To extract the essential oil from aromatherapy plants, steam distillation is used in this study. The process of extracting the essential oils requires a long time to run approximately one to two hours and need human monitoring during the process. The operator is required to check the temperature regularly which make the operator could not do other things beside than monitoring the temperature. Therefore, this study is to propose a remote temperature monitoring system to improvise the steam distillation temperature control and monitoring using IoT. Besides, having an Internal Model Control (IMC) scheme into the PID controller give extra advantage in the system. This is because it simplifies the controller of the system by providing disturbance rejection ability to achieve perfect control. The software development used the Blynk server that connects the ESP8266 NodeMCU with the Blynk Application on the smartphone. The implementation of IoT through Blynk Application has facilitated the monitoring of the distillation process without the operator on site.