Energy saving has become an extremely important issue in the chemical process industries. Distillation columns, in particular, consume huge amounts of energy. One way of minimizing the energy consumption is improved control. To achieve this, efficient modelling and system identification techniques suited for industrial use and tailored for control design applications are needed. A dynamic simulator is a useful tool for the development of such techniques.
The simulator described in this paper is to be used as a research tool to complement a pilot-scale distillation column. Therefore, the behaviour of the simulator is adapted to that of the real column by tuning a number of uncertain operating parameters of the simulator. Due to space limitations, only parameters that can be determined from steady-state data are considered in this paper. Furthermore, the implementation of the simulator in MathWork’s Simulink software is not described.
Leave a Reply