Flooding and offset-free nonlinear model predictive control of a high-purity industrial ethylene splitter using a hybrid model

This work aims to achieve flooding free control for an industrial ethylene splitter. The tower operates close to maximum capacity and experiences flooding due to feed disturbances. This work develops a replacement of the current control strategy with an offset-free Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (OF-NMPC) to improve the control and avoid flooding. OF-NMPC uses a hybrid model comprised of a Nonlinear Autoregressive Network (NARX) for …