Predictive controller design for a shell and tube heat exchanger

Process industry requires now accurate, efficient and flexible operation of the plants. There is always a need for development of innovative technologies for process modeling, dynamic trajectory optimization and high performance industrial process control. The advanced control technology which made a significant impact on industrial control engineering is model predictive control (MPC). The objective of this work is the development of MPC for a shell and tube heat exchanger and to address the difficulties in tuning a MPC. The identification of the heat exchanger is done by using the black box model technique. Although the PI controller is widely used for these types of applications there is still a need for optimization of conservation of energy. In this paper a model based predictive algorithm is used for controlling a temperature of a fluid stream using the shell and tube heat exchanger and the associated difficulties in tuning are analyzed. The transients and steady state results obtained using a MPC is compared with a conventional PI Ziegler Nicholas (ZN) controller.