Dynamic analysis and decentralised control system design for diphenyl carbonate reactive distillation process

ABSTRACT Reactive distillation (RD), a process intensified technique, involves integrating reaction and separation in a single unit. High non-linearities associated with the RD process constrict the control degrees of freedom and set the key challenge in designing a robust control system. In the present work, the design is optimised for reactive distillation–diphenyl carbonate and a decentralised feedback control configuration is applied to carry out the control studies. A comparative decentralised control performance is studied for different transfer function models obtained by using analytical and optimisation-based process identification techniques. The controller parameters obtained from the simple internal model control tuning relations are applied to (i) the linear transfer function model and (ii) non-linear plant model. Set-point tracking and load rejection studies are carried out to compare the performance of different models and investigate the non-linear model’s controller performance. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT