IMPLEMENTATION TRIAL OF INPUT-OUTPUT LINEARIZING CONTROL ON AN INDUSTRIAL EVAPORATION SIMULATOR
Kam, K.M., Tadé, M.O. and Le Page, G.P.
An evaporation simulator is being used as a real time simulation platform for the evaporation stage of the liquor burning process associated with the Bayer process for alumina production at Alcoa’s Wagerup refinery. The simulator consists of a falling film effect, three forced circulation effects and one super-concentrator effect. It is currently being used for on-site operator training, as well as for performing control studies and controller tunings for the evaporation section prior to actual plant implementation.
This paper is devoted to the implementation trial of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) globally linearizing control (GLC) structure of Kravaris and Soroush (1990) on the simulator. Implementation issues for the nonlinear control trial, such as handling of plant input’s hard constraints, linking the conventional industrial PI controllers and the nonlinear control algorithms, initialisation of industrial PI controllers during start-up of the nonlinear control algorithm are discussed.