Control of a nonlinear ice cream crystallization process

In the ice cream industry, the type of final desired product (large cartons (sqrounds) or ice creams on a stick) determine the viscosity at which the ice cream has to be produced. One of the objectives of the ice cream crystallization processes is therefore to produce an ice cream of specified viscosity. In this paper, a nonlinear control strategy is proposed for the control of the viscosity of the ice cream in a continuous crystallizer. It has been designed on the basis of a reduced order model obtained by application of the method of moments, on a population balance equation describing the evolution of the crystal size distribution. The control strategy is based on a linearizing control law coupled with a Smith predictor to account for the measurement delay. It has been validated on a pilot plant located at IRSTEA (Antony, France).