INDECS 19(4), 561-579, 2021 DOI 10.7906/indecs.19.4.8 Full text available in pdf and xml formats.

Received: 24th January 2021. Accepted: 10th May 2021. Regular article

ABSTRACT

This article provides a comparative analysis of two common control configurations used to control the side-stream distillation used to separate benzene, toluene and xylene as suggested by Doukas and Lyben. Their under-actuated model has been considered as the model of distillation column and the internal model controller is designed considering a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Virtual Inputs (VI) techniques. An internal controller design based on VI is proposed in this article for this kind of underactuated systems. This design is used to control in parallel the distillation process and its model in real time. The proposed controller design is simple and systematic in relation with the desired closed loop specifications of the internal model control structure. Furthermore, the controller obtained ensure robustness to process variations. The SVD technique can realize the decoupling of under-actuated processes and wipe out unrealizable factors by introducing compensation terms, affecting the dynamic of the system. The aim of this article is to make a comparison between our proposed VI controller and the SVD approach. The results we obtained confirmed the potentials of the proposed controller based on VI considering the set point tracking and its robustness

KEY WORDS
under-actuated systems, virtual input technique, singular value decomposition technique, internal model control, stability

CLASSIFICATION

ACM:	D.1.0, I.6.0, J.2
JEL:	L64
PACS:	02.30.Yy, 89.20.Kk