DESIGN OF ROBUST LOW-ORDER CONTROLLERS FOR COMPLEX PROCESSES: A CASE STUDY ON REACTIVE DISTILLATION IN A MEDIUM-SCALE PILOT PLANT

摘要

This paper deals with robust low-order controller design for a medium-scale pilot reactive distillation column. In the first step, a linear model of the column which is identified from experiments is used to compute the attainable control performance. In this step, actuator limitations and model uncertainty resulting from a priori knowledge as well as confidence intervals provided by the identification procedure are considered. In the second step, the result of the optimal control performance computation is employed in a frequency response approximation scheme to generate a low-order controller. Finally, the synthesised controller is validated at the reactive distillation column.