Plantwide control of industrial-scale crude distillation unit processes

In this article, the new plant wide control strategy for an industrial-scale crude distillation unit (CDU) process is presented. Within the closed-loop plant wide control framework, the inventory control is employed to operate the system safely and the quality control loops use a combination of inferential predictions and feed forward ratios to regulate the outputs of the plant in the presence of inlet perturbations. The simulation shows that the temperature spikes of trays and furnaces are effectively suppressed and the product quality is guaranteed due to no offset ASTM D86 distillation temperature responses.