Plantwide Operability Analysis based on a Network Perspective: a Study on the Tennessee Eastman Process

Complex process plants increasingly appear in modern chemical industry due to the considerable economic efficiency that complex and interactive process designs can offer. Interactions between process units (e.g., material recycle and energy integration) often cause significant difficulties in plantwide control. As such, it is important to study plantwide operability (i.e., whether a plantwide process can be effectively controlled) prior to control system design and preferably during the stage of process design. This paper presents such an analysis approach based on a network perspective, where a plantwide process is modeled as a network of process units interconnected with physical mass and energy flows. This approach can be used to determine plantwide stability, stabilizability and disturbance attenuability. The proposed method is illustrated with the Tennessee Eastman Process.