A plant-wide industrial process control problem

Abstract

This paper describes a model of an industrial chemical process for the purpose of developing, studying and evaluating process control technology. This process is well suited for a wide variety of studies including both plant-wide control and multivariable control problems. It consists of a reactor/ separator/recycle arrangement involving two simultaneous gas—liquid exothermic reactions of the following form: A(g) + C(g) + D(g) → G(liq), Product 1, A(g) + C(g) + E(g) → H(liq), Product 2. Two additional byproduct reactions also occur. The process has 12 valves available for manipulation and 41 measurements available for monitoring or control. The process equipment, operating objectives, process control objectives and process disturbances are described. A set of FORTRAN subroutines which simulate the process are available upon request. The chemical process model presented here is a challenging problem for a wide variety of process control technology studies. Even though this process has only a few unit operations, it is much more complex than it appears on first examination. We hope that this problem will be useful in the development of the process control field. We are also interested in hearing about applications of the problem.