Two degrees-of-freedom hybrid adaptive approach with pole-placement method used for control of isothermal chemical reactor

Continuous Stirred-Tank Reactors (CSTR) are technological plants often used in the chemical or biochemical industry for the production of various types of chemicals. These systems are very complex from the control point-of-view - mainly because of their nonlinearity. Controlling such processes by means of conventional methods that use controllers with fixed parameters; often produces bad - or even, unacceptable results. This is the right field for so-called "modern" control methods like Robust, Predictive, and Adaptive Control. The control method used in this work is a hybrid adaptive control where the originally nonlinear system is represented by the external linear model whose parameters are recursively identified during the control phase. The pole-placement method with a spectral factorization and two degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) control configuration used in the control synthesis in order satisfy the basic control requirements, for instance: stability, reference signal tracking and disturbance attenuation. Moreover, the resulting controller obtained from the polynomial synthesis is easily programmable and be implemented in control computers. All of the proposed methods were tested by simulations on a mathematical model of an isothermal CSTR, with a complex reaction inside. The results so obtained, demonstrate the applicability of this control method for these kinds of processes. The team used the MATLAB simulation program in this research. Copyright © 2017, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.