Development of PARS-EX pilot plant to study control strategies

A PARtially Simulated EXothermic chemical reactor (PARS-EX) pilot plant is developed in this work to carry out and evaluate various conventional and advanced control strategies. In this reactor, the heat generated from the assumed exothermic reaction was simulated through the use of a controlled steam flow rate into the reactor. Since there is no actual reaction involved, the system is defined as a 'partially simulated' reactor. The temperature of the reactor was regulated by an external plate heat exchanger that both cools the process fluid and recycles it back into the reactor. A software interface was also developed to exchange real online data and implement the various control strategies. The advanced control strategies used to control the temperature of the reactor in this work are the neural network-based controllers, which overcome the hassle in periodically tuning conventional controllers. An adaptive method is also incorporated to cater for changes in the process conditions. Tests involving set point tracking and various external and internal disturbance changes were carried out to evaluate and demonstrate the robustness of the neural network-based controllers on the PARS-EX plant. For all of the realistic online cases studied, the neural network-based controllers exhibit better control results compared to the conventional controllers.