Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology

This work deals with membrane separation processes, their modelling and optimal control. A self-optimizing control is introduced, a method proposed by Johannes Jäschke (NTNU, Norway) to control heat exchanger network by controlling "Jäschke temperatures". This type of self-optimizing control is applied to control membrane processes, specifically membrane contactor network. This network consists of a stream split into several branches where each branch passes through one or more membrane contactors. The Jäschke temperatures are defined for each branch, and the optimal controlled variable is the difference between Jäschke temperatures of each branch. By controlling difference of Jäschke temperatures a near-optimal condition is achieved, where there is no need for optimization to find the optimal set-points for the controlled variables. The aim of this work is modelling a membrane contactor network and its optimal control to achieve maximum separation and to confront the results obtained from using the Jäschke temperature to the ones from optimization and NTU method.