Model predictive control having application to distillation processes

摘要

A method of controlling a distillation column in which a temperature sensed in a top section of the column (2) is magnified and utilized within the model predictive controller (4) so that control is more aggressive as temperatures increase beyond a threshold temperature. Additionally, in the distillation column (2), or in fact in any other system in which two or more manipulated variables control two or more common controlled variables, special modeling techniques are utilized to make controller tuning easier to accomplish. In such modeling techniques, each manipulated variable is assumed to be able to have an effect on a controlled variable by a single step response model and other step response models are utilized so that the other manipulated variable(s) that also would have an effect on the same controlled variable are taken into account by the controller (4) as feed forward variables.