Design of Robust Low-order Controllers for Complex Processes: a Case Study on Reactive Distillation in a Medium-scale Pilot Plant

This paper deals with robust low-order controller design for a medium-scale pilot reactive distillation column. In the first step, a linear model of the column which is identified from experiments is used to compute the attainable control performance. In this step, actuator limitations and model uncertainty resulting from a priori knowledge as well as confidence intervals provided by the identification procedure are considered. In the second step, the result of the optimal control performance computation is employed in a frequency response approximation scheme to generate a low-order controller. Finally, the synthesised controller is validated at the reactive distillation column. Copyright c ©2005 IFAC