Robust Temperature Stabilization for Fluid Catalytic Cracking Units Using Extended Kalman-Type Estimators

Abstract

Fluidised-bed Catalytic Cracking (FCC) units, are one of the most complex and interactive processes in the refining industry, hence they are difficult to operate and to control; on the other hand they are one of the main producers of gasoline, which is an incentive to improve operation policies. This work deals with the design of regulative control law for stabilisation of reactor and regenerator temperatures considering that kinetics terms are poorly known, which is the industrial case. This control law uses on-line estimates of the heat of reaction, obtained from Kalman-like filtering of measured temperatures. The controllers designed are similar to standard input-output linearising controllers and can be tuned by standard techniques. Performance of the estimation technique under closed-loop operation is analysed by numerical simulations, considering noisy measurements and time delay in the regenerator control input.