Practical validation of the effective control of liquid-liquid heat exchangers by distributed parameter balance-based adaptive controller

This paper presents the concept of model-based control of water-water heat exchangers. Based on the simplified distributed parameter model of the unit, the distributed parameter Balance-Based Adaptive Controller is suggested and its properties are discussed. Then, the practical issues are presented for the industrial applications in the Programmable Logic Controllers. Final practical experimental stage is based on the laboratory heat exchange and distribution system and the results show that the suggested concept outperforms the control system based on the conventional PID controller, especially in terms of the disturbances rejection.