Fault-Tolerant Control implemented to Hammerstein–Wiener model: Application to Bio-ethanol dehydration

Abstract

Bio-ethanol has become one of the most important renewable resources, since it comes from renewable raw material, does not contaminate on a large scale, and can be used as an oxygenating additive or fuel applied to bivalent engines. The contribution of this work focuses on designing and applying two different controllers to evaluate the effectiveness and performance: a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) and Fuzzy PID applied to the Pressure Swing Adsorption process (PSA) with the objective that the PSA process works properly and with the ability to compensate for the faults that have occurred by correcting the control action. As a consequence of this, the process is able to continue producing Bio-ethanol complying with international purity standards. In both controllers, it stabilizes quickly and achieves the reference again eliminating the constant-type faults. However, in the case of a variable-type fault, the Fuzzy PID cannot eliminate the fault, reflecting in the results purities less than 88.4% wt of ethanol. On the other hand, the results obtained using the FTC are favorable since it achieves eliminate the fault, presenting results of purity of 99.5% wt of ethanol and it manages to comply with the international purity standards of ethanol to be used as fuel or oxygenating additive.