TUNING STATIONARY OBSERVERS: APPLICATION TO A FLOTATION UNIT SIMULATOR

Process control and optimization applications require high quality data to deliver benefits. In practice, measurement errors, coherency problems and the lack of availability of strategic variables are often encountered. Observers are widely used in the process industry to increase the accuracy and the reliability of plant data (e.g. data reconciliation by mass balancing). However, the tuning of the variance matrices of the model and measurement uncertainties remains a challenge in practice. The article proposes different solutions to this problem and illustrates them using a flotation unit simulator.