Temperature Control of EDC Thermal Cracking Furnace with a Coupled ODE and 2D-PDEs Model

This paper presents a new control technique for the EDC thermal cracking furnace modeled by sets of ordinary differential equation (ODE) and 2D-partial differential equations (PDEs). The dynamics of coupled 2DPDEs-ODE model have been divided into 2 subsystems, set of state variables of the internal and external cracking coil. With the concept of input-output (I/O) linearization, these inner and outer dynamics are applied to design the setpoint tracking calculator and the approximate I/O feedback controller respectively. The first-order error dynamics and the finite-based, open-loop observer are integrated with the proposed controller system to compensate the model mismatch and to predict the unmeasured state information. The performances of the proposed method are evaluated through the servo test. The results showed that the control method effectively forces the output to the desired setpoint.