Multimodel identification for control of an ill-conditioned distillation column

Identification for control of an ill-conditioned system requires special techniques. The directionality of such a system should be taken into account in the design of identification experiments. In distillation, information about the directionality properties can be obtained from certain flow gains, which are easy to determine in practice. Based on such information, the high-and low-gain directions of the plant can be explicitly excited. In this paper, a pilot-scale distillation column is identified by this approach at two different operating points. At each operating point, a nominal second-order plus time-delay model with logarithmic outputs is determined. This model structure makes it possible to capture the dynamic directionality of the plant. In addition, models describing variations and uncertainties in the high-and low-gain directions are determined by a special technique. The models obtained are superior to models determined via traditional step tests. The former satisfy integral controllability requirements, while the latter tend to violate them. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.