ON THE APPLICATION OF TUNING REGULATORS TO OBTAIN ROBUST FEEDFORWARD-FEEDBACK CONTROLLERS FOR AN INDUSTRIAL HEAT EXCHANGER.

The synthesis of a controller for an industrial heat exchanger using tuning regulators is described in this paper. The problem considered is to find a robust feedback-feedforward controller so that the output temperature and output flow of the heat exchanger are satisfactorily regulated, independent of any variations in input flow, input temperature etc. of the process. The heat exchanger considered has a number of nonlinearities present along with time lags and diffusion effects; since a satisfactory mathematical model describing the behavior of the heat exchanger was not available, the approach taken to solve the problem was to apply tuning regulator theory to the system, assuming that the heat exchangers is subject to constant disturbances. Applying some simple experiments on the heat exchanger, it was determined that there exists a solution to the problem and a controller was then obtained using some simple on-line tuning experiments. This paper describes these experiments, the results of performing the on-line tuning and the final control configuration obtained.