Anti-windup scheme for PI temperature control of an open-loop unstable chemical reactor

Abstract

The problem of designing a proportional-integral (PI) temperature control with anti-windup (AW) scheme for an open-loop (OL) unstable chemical reactor is addressed. The aim is to improve the systematization of application-oriented designs employed in industrial practice. The combination of nonlinear dynamics and industrial control ideas yields a PI controller: (i) with back-calculation (BC) AW scheme, (ii) with assurance of robust closed-loop (CL) operation with criterion to choose control gain and limits, and (iii) that outperforms existing AW with BC plus conditional integration (CI) scheme. The proposed approach is illustrated and tested with a representative example through numerical simulations.