Modelling And Advanced Process Control Application Of Hydrocarbon Distillation Process

The production quality and the output of an enterprise of the refining and chemical industries are usually determined by distillation process, a physical separate process that is the mostly frequently used in these industries. Distillation column is the most energy-consuming plant in the refining industry and the distillation process consumes about 40 percents of the whole energy consumed by the industry. What is more, the distillation will consume more and more energy along with the higher requirement of separation.Presently, the control of many industry distillation columns is still at a level of single-loop with several parameters. However, the regular single-loop control is difficult to meet the expected control object in the case that there are obviously load change or material and energy disturbance in the process.An enterprise will benefit more from the improvement of the operation of distillation column and the quality of production, the increase of target production output and the decrease of consumed energy by exploiting the advanced process control (APC) technology.A quite great progress of the APC technology has been made in the past decades and the technology has been applied in many plants in refining and chemical enterprises. However, there is few independent developed APC software in domestic. Based on the application of the software of APC-Adcon, an advanced multi-variables robust predictive control software developed by ZHEJIANG SUPCON SOFTWARE CO., LTD, in a hydrocarbon distillation plant, this thesis studies the application of the APC technology.The main contents of this thesis are outlined as follows:The new progress of the APC technology and model predictive control is reviewed in Chapter 1.The principle of model multi-variables predictive control technology including its development history, basic principle and algorithm is introduced in Chapter 2.The technical process of hydrocarbon distillation plant is introduced and theapplication actuality of APC in distillation plant is analyzed in Chapter 3.The control difficulties of hydrocarbon distillation plant are analyzed and its corresponding APC frame is proposed in Chapter 4.The implementation of APC on hydrocarbon distillation plant and its control effect is introduced in Chapter 5.Finally, the research work of this thesis is summarized and the application of the APC technology in the process industry is also prospected in the last Chapter.