ADVANCED CONTROL OF A TMP REFINER LINE: A SIMULATION STUDY

摘要

In this paper, we present a simulation study of an advanced control system for a thermo-mechanical pulping (TMP) refiner line. The TMP line is two-stage with a primary refiner and a secondary refiner. The advanced control system consists of two layers: an optimization layer and a regulatory layer. Traditionally, the optimization is performed with a nonlinear steady-state process model. However, the process economical optimum may no longer be at steady-state due to the model/plant mismatch and disturbances, and significant transients. To address this problem, we instead formulated the problem as dynamic optimization with constrained non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) techniques in the optimization layer.