Certain investigations on fault tolerant control and reconfiguration of nonlinear distillation column process

Abstract

Process industries contribute enormously to the growth of country. Controlling of a process in such industries are complex due to the presence of disturbances, strong interactions and nonlinear in nature. Conventional way of controlling a process is not appreciated if a nonlinear process handled with constraints including error variation with time, interactions in loops and deviations in variables due to effect of disturbances. One such nonlinear process is a distillation column, where processing and separation of chemical compounds take place at huge volume. Chemicals, being the major source of every industry, need continuous production and high product quality thus demanding an efficient control strategy with stable operating limits. Economic aspect, environmental effects and energy saving remains a tough task as this distillation process in a chemical industry is concerned. Analysis of fault tolerant control and reconfiguration mechanism is presented in this research for ensuring better performance and stable operating of the distillation column. Fault tolerant control helps in reduction of impact due to the abrupt faults that occur in the column variables. Reconfiguration helps in minimizing the effects of disturbances and fault that occur in the process with variation of time. Effectiveness of reconfiguration depends on the fault tolerant controller. To enhance the performance of fault tolerant control and reconfiguration, various controllers such as conventional controller, artificial intelligent controller and optimization algorithms are analyzed newline