Plantwide Control of a Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit: Product Recovery Section

摘要

The goal of plantwide control studies is to design a control system which can achieve the operating requirements of the complete plant optimal conditions. The problem focus the whole plant and not only single equipment. The size of plant-wide control problems are larger than that for individual units, making the solution much more difficult. The main problem is the presence of recycle streams, that provide interactions between different equipment. Disturbances that enter a process can propagate not only downstream from one unit operation to the next, but upstream through recycle loops. In this work, the product recovery section of a fluid catalytic unit was used to discuss the optimization and the control of large plants. This unit was chosen due to the presence of four recycle loops, what makes the study interesting and allows to verify the equipment coupling. The control system must be able to reject not only local disturbances at the unit level, but also at the plant level.