Mathematical modeling, control and simulation of petroleum distillation column

Distillation column processing is the most vital separation technology in the petroleum industries for purification of final products. Distillation columns are made up of several components each of which is used either to transfer heat energy or to enhance mass transfer. An inclination to controlling distillation columns in a manner that is economically efficient depends much on the selection of reliable systems. This thesis presents a detailed methodology to derive a calculation procedure of the distillation column to build a gas processing plant to raise the utility value of condensate. The quality of the output products are the purity of the distillate product should higher than or equal to 98% and the impurity of the bottoms product, should less or equal than 2%. The L-V structure, which is called energy balance structure, is considered as the standard control structure for the distillation system design. In this design system the liquid flow rate and the vapor flow rate are inputs variable parameters to determine the purity and impurity of the output product concentration. Therefore, an appropriate control system is essential for designing stage. The main role of the controller is to sustain the output concentration despite the disturbance in the feed flow and the feed concentration. This thesis will deliberate a control model system development via three steps. Firstly, develop a calculation procedure of a distillation column for simulation and analysis. Second for the controller design: a reduced-order linear model is derived such that it best reflects the dynamic of the distillation process and used as the reference model for a model-reference adaptive control (MRAC) system and thirdly, verify the ability of a conventional adaptive controller for the distillation system when dealing with process mismatch and feeding disturbances. However, in this study, the system identification is not fully employed as the actual production factors and designed structures are not validated. In this research, the calculations and simulations are implemented by using MATLAB (version 7.0) software package.