Design Of A Robust Electronic Internal Temperature Controller For Petroleum Distillation Columns

Abstract

Design of a Robust Electronic Internal Temperature Controller for Petroleum Distillation is presented in this Thesis. During unstable weather conditions, there is a noticeable drop in the distillation internal column temperature. An extreme and frustrating case of this occurs during rainfall and at night when the fractional distillation column external temperature drops, greatly affecting the internal. Consequently, it becomes difficult to maintain a stable and optimum internal temperature of the distillation column. This research is therefore aimed at designing a robust electronic internal temperature controller to stabilize the internal temperature of a petroleum fractional distillation column. The material balance and energy balance models have been used to achieve the transfer function and state equation of the system. A suitable fine-tuned PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) controller was designed and integrated to the system. The simulation results obtained include: settling time is 0.961 seconds, rise time of 0.32 seconds, 8.78% overshoot and steady state error less than 2%. The results show a significant improvement on the performance of the column internal temperature control system.