IFAC symposium on environmental systems planning, design and control

Abstract

This paper seeks to expose the relative merits of output structural controllability (OSC) as an integrative tool for process design and control. Output structural controllability assists the design engineer in flow-sheet selection, via the elimination of uncontrollable flowsheets, and in control structure synthesis. The qualitative nature of the technique means that it can be performed at the early stages of design, when alternative flowsheets have been proposed, but quantitative design parameters are unknown. As such, OSC may significantly reduce the amount of quantitative modelling required, thereby providing a significant cost saving. Two industrial case studies are examined: a wet grinding circuit and the purification section of an ethylene oxide production plant. In both cases, a control structure is synthesised using a protoype software package developed at The University of Queensland. The control structure designs are seen to be operable recommendations, and similar to those employed by both operating companies; designs which were probably the result of much trial-and-error, many iterations and based on far greater (quantitative) information. The integration of process design and control is a difficult problem. This paper demonstrates that OSC is one tool which may be employed by process design and control engineers to address this problem.