Dynamic Mathematical Modelling and Advanced Control Strategies for Complex Hydrogenation Process

Over the last past decades, the number of control system applications in the chemical and petrochemical domains has increased considerably. However, due to the diversity and particularity of chemical processes, there are still many challenges that have to be addressed like: system identification, performance enhancement, monitoring, diagnosis and more importantly closed-loop stability, robustness. Taking into account that most chemical processes are complex, nonlinear MIMO (multi-input multi-output) systems, the challenge is even greater. This book chapter is directed towards the development and the implementation of modern control algorithms for complex and high-risk petro-chemical processes, the considered case study being the production of 2 ethyl-hexanol through the 2 ethyl-hexenal hydrogenation process. 2 ethyl-hexanol is mainly used in the production of plasticizers for polyvinyl chloride (PVC) manufacture. In the second part, is described the mathematical modelling of the 2 ethyl-hexenal hydrogenation process including also the simulation and validation of the developed mathematical models. The third part will focus on the design and implementation of conventional control strategy. Section four is dedicated to the design and implementation of several advanced control strategies like Internal Model Control and robust control. The conclusions section represents the last part of the chapter

Controller Design for Active Vibration Damping with Inertial Actuators

In the machining industry, there is a constant need to improve productivity while maintaining required dimensional tolerances and surface quality. The self-excited vibration called chatter is one of the main factors limiting machining productivity. Chatter produces unstable cutting conditions during machining and unstable forces will damage and shorten the life of the machine tool. It can also damage the cutting tool, machining components as well as produce a poor surface finish on the workpiece. Researchers have developed various chatter suppression techniques such as changing process parameters, spindle speeds, and using passive dampers. However, many of these methods are not very robust to changing dynamics in the machine tool due to changing machine positioning, cutting setups, etc. Active vibration damping with a force actuator is a robust method of adding damping by due to its bandwidth and variable controller gains. However, the commissioning of the controller design for the actuators is not trivial and requires significant manual tuning to reach optimal productivity. The research presented in this thesis aims to simplify and automate the controller design process for force actuators. A frequency domain, sensitivity based automatic controller tuning method for force actuators has been developed. This method uses the measured actuator dynamics and open-loop system dynamics to develop a prediction tool for closed-loop responses without needing to have the complete system model (model free). By monitoring the predicted closed-loop response of various virtually designed controllers, an optimal controller is found amongst the candidate parameter values. The stability of the system and actuator is monitored during the search to ensure that the system is stable throughout its bandwidth that the actuator does not become saturated. The controller is then experimentally tested to ensure that the predicted output is the same as the real output. In cases where the system has several vibration modes that are in counter-phase and close in frequency, the model-free approach does not perform well. A more complex model-based control law has also been developed and implemented. The method automatically identifies a transfer function model for the measured open-loop system dynamics and synthesizes mixed-sensitivity optimization based controller to damp out the modes in counter-phase. In order to verify that the model-based controllers can reduce vibration modes in counter-phase, a small-scale experimental setup was developed to mimic machine tools with vibration modes in counter-phase. A flexure was designed and fabricated. A shaker from Modal Shop is used as an active damping actuator to reduce the flexure’s vibration modes. It was concluded that while the model-based controller synthesis techniques were able to damp the vibration modes in counter phase, the flexure was too simplistic and the model-free controller was able to achieve similar results

Computationalcost Reduction of Robust Controllers Foractive Magnetic Bearing Systems

This work developed strategies for reducing the computational complexity of implementing robust controllers for active magnetic bearing (AMB) systems and investigated the use of a novel add-on controller for gyroscopic effect compensation to improve achievable performance with robust controllers. AMB systems are multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems with many interacting mechanisms that needs to fulfill conflicting performance criteria. That is why robust control techniques are a perfect application for AMB systems as they provide systematic methods to address both robustness and performance objectives. However, robust control techniques generally result in high order controllers that require high-end control hardware for implementation. Such controllers are not desirable by industrial AMB vendors since their hardware is based on embedded systems with limited bandwidths. That is why the computational cost is a major obstacle towards industry adaptation of robust controllers. Two novel strategies are developed to reduce the computational complexity of singlerate robust controllers while preserving robust performance. The first strategy identifies a dual-rate configuration of the controller for implementation. The selection of the dualrate configuration uses the worst-case plant analysis and a novel approach that identifies the largest tolerable perturbations to the controller. The second strategy aims to redesign iv the controller by identifying and removing negligible channels in the context of robust performance via the largest tolerable perturbations to the controller. The developed methods are demonstrated both in simulation and experiment using three different AMB systems, where significant computational savings are achieved without degrading the performance. To improve the achievable performance with robust controllers, a novel add-on controller is developed to compensate the gyroscopic effects in flexible rotor-AMB systems via modal feedback control. The compensation allows for relaxing the robustness requirements in the control problem formulation, potentially enabling better performance. The effectiveness of the developed add-on controller is demonstrated experimentally on two AMB systems with different rotor configurations. The effects of the presence of the add-on controller on the performance controller design is investigated for one of the AMB systems. Slight performance improvements are observed at the cost of increased power consumption and increased computational complexity

Modeling, Simulation and Decentralized Control of Islanded Microgrids

Modeling, Simulation and Decentralized Control of Islanded Microgrids by Farideh Doost Mohammadi This thesis develops a comprehensive modular state-space model of microgrids containing inverter-based Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The model is validated and then used for small signal stability enhancement and voltage and frequency control. State space models of various microgrid elements are first derived, which allow for the inclusion of any possible elements such as current controlled inverters that are missing in the literature. Then a complete state space model is obtained to complement the models that are available in the literature and whose objectives are system analysis only as compared to the purpose of this work which is stability enhancement and control design. Specifically,;1. Small signal stability is enhanced by adding current controlled inverters to the microgrid. 2. Decentralized secondary frequency and voltage control techniques are proposed.;For secondary frequency control purposes, at first, the control strategies of different kinds of inverters and storage devices are described. Then, a novel solution is introduced for islanded microgrids by decomposing the system into virtual control areas.;For the secondary voltage control an Average Consensus Algorithm (ACA) is used and applied on a network of agents which has been chosen optimally based on the required connectivity. The main purpose of the ACA is to keep the average voltage of all the buses at a desired level during islanding. Then another control strategy is proposed to improve the voltage profile. While the average voltage is kept fixed by the voltage controlled inverters, this voltage profile smoothness is obtained by dedicating zones to current controlled inverters and defining their responsibilities based on the location of the loads