INVESTIGATION OF ADVANCED CONTROL STRATEGY FOR A pH NEUTRALIZATION PROCESS PLANT

pH neutralization is one of the crucial processes to all industries with various functions range from food processing industry to wastewater treatment. Hence, the process must be maintained at optimum performance to fulfill its functionality. However, pH neutralization is a highly nonlinear process with high sensitivity at the neutralization point. The complexity of the process has challenged the conventional control strategy's performance. Currently, the control strategy used in the pilot plant (PI controller) is adequate with certain range of error. Thus, the objective of this project is to investigate, design and implement advanced control strategy which can improve the overall performance of the conventional control strategy. The calibration results show that the pilot plant's measuring meters have poor accuracy and repeatability. Due to this, no practical experiments have been performed throughout this research. Prior to simulation works, the pilot plant's model obtained from other researcher has been validated. The simulation results show that the model has faster dynamic response compare to the pilot plant. Nevertheless, the model is still being used for simulation. Through this research, the limitation of PI control strategy in controlling nonlinear process has been observed. Fuzzy logic controller (FLC) has been developed to improve the control performance of PI controller. According to the simulation results, FLC has produced excellent control performance with the ability of controlling process' nonlinear region. As a conclusion, advanced control strategy such as FLC is more superior to PI controller in nonlinear process control. For further research, perhaps the advanced control strategy developed can be implemented in the pilot plant to examine its real time performance

OPERATION AND PROCESS CONTROL DEVELOPMENT FOR A PILOT-SCALE LEACHING AND SOLVENT EXTRACTION CIRCUIT RECOVERING RARE EARTH ELEMENTS FROM COAL-BASED SOURCES

The US Department of Energy in 2010 has identified several rare earth elements as critical materials to enable clean technologies. As part of ongoing research in REEs (rare earth elements) recovery from coal sources, the University of Kentucky has designed, developed and is demonstrating a ¼ ton/hour pilot-scale processing plant to produce high-grade REEs from coal sources. Due to the need to control critical variables (e.g. pH, tank level, etc.), process control is required. To ensure adequate process control, a study was conducted on leaching and solvent extraction control to evaluate the potential of achieving low-cost REE recovery in addition to developing a process control PLC system. The overall operational design and utilization of Six Sigma methodologies is discussed. Further, the application of the controls design, both procedural and electronic for the control of process variables such as pH is discussed. Variations in output parameters were quantified as a function of time. Data trends show that the mean process variable was maintained within prescribed limits. Future work for the utilization of data analysis and integration for data-based decision-making will be discussed

Measuring, modelling and controlling the pH value and the dynamic chemical state

pH value is a challenging quantity to measure, model and control. In fact, pH value is a mere one-dimensional projection of a multi-dimensional quantity called chemical state and measuring, modelling and controlling the chemical state is much more challenging. This thesis contributes to all aspects of pH processes. A new method for measuring the pH value under difficult conditions (pressure and flow variations in thick pulp) is presented. Classical physico-chemical modelling of chemical systems is extended with a concept of population principle which is a new formulation of the "reaction invariant - reaction variant" structure. Self-organising fuzzy controller (SOC) is modified to suit pH-processes better (high frequency noise and oscillations are damped more efficiently). All the methods described above were tested with practical applications that include a pilot neutralisation process, an industrial ammonia scrubber and a paper machine wet end. The new methods showed such a significant improvement that they were installed permanently on the industrial applications.reviewe

Modelling and Control of Chemical Processes using Local Linear Model Networks

Recently, technology and research in control systems have made fast progress in numerous fields, such as chemical process engineering. The modelling and control may face some challenges as the procedures applied to chemical reactors and processes are nonlinear. Therefore, the aim of this research is to overcome these challenges by applying a local linear model networks technique to identify and control temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen. The reactor studied exhibits a nonlinear function, which contains heating power, flow rate of base, and the flow rate of air as the input parameters and temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen (pO2) the output parameters. The local linear model networks technique is proposed and applied to identify and control the pH process. This method was selected following a comparison of radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The results revealed that local linear model networks yielded less mean square errors than RBFNN and ANFIS. Then proportional-integral (PI) and local linear model controllers are implemented using the direct design method for the pH process. The controllers were designed on the first order pH model with 4 local models and the scaling factor is 20. Moreover, local linear model networks are also used to identify and control the level of dissolved oxygen. To select the best method for system identification, a gradient descent learning algorithm is also used to update the width scaling factor in the network, with findings compared to the manual approach for local linear model networks. However, the results demonstrated that manually updating the scaling factor yielded less mean square error than gradient descent. Consequently, PI and local linear model controllers are designed using the direct design method to control and maintain the dissolved oxygen level. The controllers were designed on first and second order pO2 model with 3 local models and the scaling factor is 20. The results for the first order revealed good control performance. However, the results for second order model lead to ringing poles which caused an unstable output with an oscillation in the input. This problem was solved by zero cancellation in the controller design and these results show good control performance. Finally, the temperature process was identified using local linear model networks and PI and local linear model controllers were designed using the direct design method. From the results, it can be observed that the first order model gives acceptable output responses compared to the higher order model. The control action for the output was behaving much better on the first order model when the number of local models M=4, compared with M=3 and M=5. Furthermore, the results revealed that the mean square error became less when the number of local models M=4 in the controller, compared with having number of local models M=3 and M=5

Extensional fuzzy logic controllers for uncertain systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Simulation-based coyote optimization algorithm to determine gains of PI controller for enhancing the performance of solar PV water-pumping system

In this study, a simulation-based coyote optimization algorithm (COA) to identify the gains of PI to ameliorate the water-pumping system performance fed from the photovoltaic system is presented. The aim is to develop a stand-alone water-pumping system powered by solar energy, i.e., without the need of electric power from the utility grid. The voltage of the DC bus was adopted as a good candidate to guarantee the extraction of the maximum power under partial shading conditions. In such a system, two proportional-integral (PI) controllers, at least, are necessary. The adjustment of (Proportional-Integral) controllers are always carried out by classical and tiresome trials and errors techniques which becomes a hard task and time-consuming. In order to overcome this problem, an optimization problem was reformulated and modeled under functional time-domain constraints, aiming at tuning these decision variables. For achieving the desired operational characteristics of the PV water-pumping system for both rotor speed and DC-link voltage, simultaneously, the proposed COA algorithm is adopted. It is carried out through resolving a multiobjective optimization problem employing the weighted-sum technique. Inspired on theCanis latransspecies, the COA algorithm is successfully investigated to resolve such a problem by taking into account some constraints in terms of time-domain performance as well as producing the maximum power from the photovoltaic generation system. To assess the efficiency of the suggested COA method, the classical Ziegler-Nichols and trial-error tuning methods for the DC-link voltage and rotor speed dynamics, were compared. The main outcomes ensured the effectiveness and superiority of the COA algorithm. Compared to the other reported techniques, it is superior in terms of convergence rapidity and solution qualities

Neural Networks for Modeling and Control of Particle Accelerators

We describe some of the challenges of particle accelerator control, highlight recent advances in neural network techniques, discuss some promising avenues for incorporating neural networks into particle accelerator control systems, and describe a neural network-based control system that is being developed for resonance control of an RF electron gun at the Fermilab Accelerator Science and Technology (FAST) facility, including initial experimental results from a benchmark controller.Comment: 21 p

Evolutionary polymorphic neural networks in chemical engineering modeling

Evolutionary Polymorphic Neural Network (EPNN) is a novel approach to modeling chemical, biochemical and physical processes. This approach has its basis in modern artificial intelligence, especially neural networks and evolutionary computing. EPNN can perform networked symbolic regressions for input-output data, while providing information about both the structure and complexity of a process during its own evolution. In this work three different processes are modeled: 1. A dynamic neutralization process. 2. An aqueous two-phase system. 3. Reduction of a biodegradation model. In all three cases, EPNN shows better or at least equal performances over published data than traditional thermodynamics /transport or neural network models. Furthermore, in those cases where traditional modeling parameters are difficult to determine, EPNN can be used as an auxiliary tool to produce equivalent empirical formulae for the target process. Feedback links in EPNN network can be formed through training (evolution) to perform multiple steps ahead predictions for dynamic nonlinear systems. Unlike existing applications combining neural networks and genetic algorithms, symbolic formulae can be extracted from EPNN modeling results for further theoretical analysis and process optimization. EPNN system can also be used for data prediction tuning. In which case, only a minimum number of initial system conditions need to be adjusted. Therefore, the network structure of EPNN is more flexible and adaptable than traditional neural networks. Due to the polymorphic and evolutionary nature of the EPNN system, the initially randomized values of constants in EPNN networks will converge to the same or similar forms of functions in separate runs until the training process ends. The EPNN system is not sensitive to differences in initial values of the EPNN population. However, if there exists significant larger noise in one or more data sets in the whole data composition, the EPNN system will probably fail to converge to a satisfactory level of prediction on these data sets. EPNN networks with a relatively small number of neurons can achieve similar or better performance than both traditional thermodynamic and neural network models. The developed EPNN approach provides alternative methods for efficiently modeling complex, dynamic or steady-state chemical processes. EPNN is capable of producing symbolic empirical formulae for chemical processes, regardless of whether or not traditional thermodynamic models are available or can be applied. The EPNN approach does overcome some of the limitations of traditional thermodynamic /transport models and traditional neural network models