Robust control of continuous stirred tank reactor with jacket cooling

Abstract

Continuous Stirred-Tank Reactors (CSTR) belong to basic technological equipment frequently used in the the production of various types of chemicals. These systems are quite complex with many nonlinearities. So, the conventional linear control with fixed parameters can be questionable or unacceptable. The solution should be found in so-called “non-traditional” control approaches like Adaptive, Robust, Fuzzy or Artificial Intelligent methods. One way is the utilization of selftuning adaptive schemes but computations are quite difficult, clumsy and time-consuming. This paper brings an alternative principle called robust approach. This approach considers a linear system with parametric uncertainty which covers a family of all feasible plants. Then a controller with fix parameters is designed so that for all possible plants the acceptable control behavior is obtained. The two degree of freedom (2DOF) structure for the control law was chosen. All calculation and simulations of mathematical models and control responses was performed in the Matlab and Simulink environment. Copyright © 2019, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.