Control of reactive dividing wall column for selective hydrogenation and separation of C3 stream

The thermally coupled reactive distillation process in the left is thermodynamically equivalent to the reactive dividing wall column configuration in the right. The difficulties in the control of dividing wall column are due to its inner complex structure and interactions among different control loops. The objective of this paper is to investigate multi-loop PID control schemes of reactive dividing wall column for selective hydrogenation and separation of C3 stream. Four different control schemes are proposed in this paper for reactive dividing wall column. The performances of the control structures are tested with ± 20% persistent disturbances in either feed flow rate or feed compositions.