Control of reactive distillation production of high-purity isopropanol

The process characteristics and control strategy of a high-purity IPA reactive distillation column were investigated. A robust nominal operation was found by maintaining an excess of propylene feed to the column and recycling the unreacted propylene to the feed instead of the top stage. Stage temperature and propylene composition with one-to-one relationship with reboiler duty and propylene feed are selected as controlled variables for maintaining bottom purity and feed ratio in the presence of possible measurement bias respectively. High nonlinearity between selected input–output pair was reduced by using variable transformation. Dynamic simulations demonstrated that such a control scheme with nonlinear transformed variable was capable of providing much superior control performance than the one using natural variable.     

On the use of 2-D coding techniques for ECG signals.

This paper discusses the convenience of using two-dimensional (2-D) coding techniques for the compression of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. These signals present a very clear periodicity that can be exploited by the use of a 2-D time/frequency transform to decorrelate it as much as possible. A brief theoretical approach is given to justify the use of this technique, and a comparison is made between a 2-D and a one-dimensional (1-D) uniform quantization scenarios. The influence of the error as well as the frame size on the estimation of the fundamental period is studied.