Advanced Control Stndies on Heat Exchanger Pilot Plant

Heat exchanger is a device that is widely used in engineering processes and
often needed in a process plant. It is built for efficient heat transfer, from one fluid to
the other and help in increasing or decreasing the temperature of medium that passes
through the device. The application of heat exchanger can be seen in chemical plants,
petrochemical plants, petroleum refmeries, natural gas processing, power plants, and
sewage treatment. Every process plant needs a reliable controller to control the
system; therefore Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller was developed
decades ago. In a heat exchanger device (and plant), normally PID controller is used.
The conventional PID controller is very famous because of its simplicity and
robustness. Although the controller is the most popular controller, its classic tuning
suffers a few systematic design problems. It is difficult to adjust and get the best PID
parameters. The objective of this project is to introduce alternative controller that
uses advance control strategy. Designing the advance control strategy is based on the
heat exchanger in a pilot plant in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (U1P). A pilot
plant is a small chemical processing plant that is operated to generate information
regarding the behavior of the real system used in a larger plant. The the development
of new controller and the simulation of the controllers are through MA TLAB. The
aim is to improve the performance of pilot plant so that the operation will be
smoother, more efficient and the product earn is improved by using the new control
strategy. In the end of the project, the obtained model of the controller is Fuzzy
Logic Controller (FLC). The developed FLC demonstrates better control
performance than the conventional PID controller.