Model predictive control for the reactant concentration control of a reactor

The reactant concentration control of a reactor using Model Predictive Control (MPC) is presented in this paper. Two major difficulties in the control of reactant concentration are that the measurement of concentration is not available for the control point of view and it is not possible to control the concentration without considering the reactor temperature. Therefore, MIMO control techniques and state and parameter estimation are needed. One of the MIMO control techniques widely studied recently is MPC. The basic concept of MPC is that it computes a control trajectory for a whole horizon time minimising a cost function of a plant subject to a dynamic plant model and an end point constraint. However, only the initial value of controls is then applied. Feedback is incorporated by using the measurements/estimates to reconstruct the calculation for the next time step. Since MPC is a model based controller, it requires the measurement of the states of an appropriate process model. However, in most industrial processes, the state variables are not all measurable. Therefore, an extended Kalman filter (EKF), one of estimation techniques, is also utilised to estimate unknown/uncertain parameters of the system. Simulation results have demonstrated that without the reactor temperature constraint, the MPC with EKF can control the reactant concentration at a desired set point but the reactor temperator is raised over a maximum allowable value. On the other hand, when the maximun allowable value is added as a constraint, the MPC with EKF can control the reactant concentration at the desired set point with less drastic control action and within the reactor temperature constraint. This shows that the MPC with EKF is applicable to control the reactant concentration of chemical reactors.