Why Control?

Chemical plants are intended to be operated under known and specified conditions. There
are several reasons why this is so:
Safety:
Formal safety and environmental constraints must not be violated.
Operability:
Certain conditions are required by chemistry and physics for the desired reactions
or other operations to take place. It must be possible for the plant to be arranged
to achieve them.
Economic:
Plants are expensive and intended to make money. Final products must meet
market requirements of purity, otherwise they will be unsaleable. Conversely the
manufacture of an excessively pure product will involve unnecessary cost.

A chemical plant might be thought of as a collection of tanks in which materials are

heated, cooled and reacted, and of pipes through which they flow. Such a system will not,
in general, naturally maintain itself in a state such that precisely the temperature required
by a reaction is achieved, a pressure in excess of the safe limits of all vessels be avoided,
or a flowrate just sufficient to achieve the economically optimum product composition
arise.

Control Objectives
Control systems in chemical plants have, as noted, three functions.

 Safety.
 Operability, i.e. to ensure that particular flows and holdup are maintained at
chosen values within operating ranges.
 To control product quality, process energy consumption etc.

To a large extent these are quite separate objectives. Indeed, in the case of safety systems
separate equipment is generally used. The aims of control for operability are secondary to
those of strategic control for quality etc., which directly affect process profitability.

Control for Safety

Concern for safety is paramount in designing a chemical plant and its control systems.
Ideally a process design should be `intrinsically safe', that is, plant and equipment should
be such so that any deviation, such as an increase in reactor pressure, will itself change
operating conditions so that it is rapidly removed, for example by a fall in reaction rate.
For many perturbations this type of responsive, passive safety system will not be possible
and active systems will be required.
These active safety systems must be robust and of high integrity. Current processes
achieve this through simplicity. The ultimate safety system is in most cases the
mechanical relief valve which simply vents the plant to atmosphere, possibly through a
flare or scrubber.

We will not discuss control for safety explicitly in this book. Generally speaking a
complete and separate system is provided to handle emergency control action. The need
for this, and its design requirements, are established in hazard and operability or hazop
studies. These are typicaly carried out on the complete process with its `normal' control
systems in place.

A number of safety issues will be addressed in the course of developing the design of the
control systems for normal operation, but it must be emphasised that our treatment of this
vital issue will be relatively restricted.

Control for Operability

The operator of a process quite simply has to
 know what it is doing
 be able to make it do what he or she wants, rather than to follow its natural
inclinations.

The issue of making a plant behave in this way is called operability.

The majority of control loops in a plant control system are associated with operability.
Specific flow rates have to be set, levels in vessels maintained and chosen operating
temperatures for reactors and other equipment achieved.

Control for Profitability

There is no point in building a plant which is totally safe and can be made to take up any
(safe) conditions of flow, temperature etc., if the conditions under which it is operated do
not produce the correct amount of product to the correct specification, thus allowing its
operators to make a profit.

The top level of process control, what we will refer to as the strategic control level is thus
concerned with achieving the appropriate values principally of:

 Production rate,
 Product quality, and
 Energy economy.

Techniques of Control
Basic Concepts of Feedback Control
The task of maintaining these required conditions falls to one or, more usually several,
process control systems with which the plant will be equipped. The practical aspects of
these will be discussed more fully in the following module. The underlying principle of
most process control, however, is already understood by anyone who has grasped the
operation of the domestic hot water thermostat:
 The quantity whose value is to be maintained or regulated, e.g. the temperature of
the water in a cistern, is measured.
 Comparison of the measured and required values provides an error, e.g. `too hot'
or `too cold'.
 On the basis of the error, a control algorithm decides what to do.

Such an algorithm might be:

If the temperature is too high then turn the heater off. If it is too low then turn the
heater on.

 The adjustment chosen by the control algorithm is applied to some adjustable

variable, such as the power input to the water heater.

This summarises the basic operation of a feedback control system such as one would
expect to find carrying out nearly all control operations on chemical plants, and indeed in
most other circumstances where control is required. The diagram belows a feedback
control loop.

Notice that this extremely simple idea has a number of very convenient properties. The
feedback control system seeks to bring the measured quantity to its required value or
setpoint. The control system does not need to know why the measured value is not
currently what is required, only that this is so. There are two possible causes of such a
disparity:
 The system has been disturbed. This is the common situation for a chemical plant
subject to all sorts of external upsets. However, the control system does not need
to know what the source of the disturbance was.
 The setpoint has been changed. In the absence of external disturbance, a change in
setpoint will introduce an error. The control system will act until the measured
quantity reaches its new setpoint.

A control system of this sort should also handle simultaneous changes in setpoint and
disturbances.

Advantages of Feedback Control

Not only does the feedback control system require no knowledge of the source or nature
of disturbances, but it requires minimal detailed information about how the process itself
works.

Feedback control action is entirely empirical, so long as an adjustment is being made in

the correct `sense', e.g. more heat means increasing temperature and vice versa, then the
control system should remove the effect of an external disturbance.

As we will see, it helps to know more than this, but the minimum information required to
make a feedback control system work is whether the adjustment makes the measurement
go up or down.

Disadvantages of Feedback Control

The main disadvantage of feedback control is that the disturbance enters into the process
and upsets it. It is after the process output is different from the setpoint that the controller
takes some corrective actions. Although most processes allow some fluctuation of
controlled variable within a certain range, there are two process conditions which can
make the overall effectiveness of feedback control quite unsatisfactory. One of these is
the occurrence of disturbances of a large magnitude that is strong enough to seriously
affect or even damage the process. The other is the occurrence of a large amount of lag
(time delay) within the process. These are discussed further below.

Large Magnitude Disturbance

An example where the occurrence of disturbances of large magnitude that are strong
enough to seriously effect the process, is temperature control of a catalyst reactor in
which strong exothermic reaction takes place. The reaction heat is very high, therefore
the reactant gas mixture is diluted by a inert gas to carry away most reaction heat,
although the temperature of the reactor is maintained by feedback control of a coolant
flowrate in coils inside. Assuming a large magnitude disturbance, the sudden large
increase in the reactant concentration in the feed, enters the reactor, a sudden increase in
the temperature is so large and so quick that the catalyst is burnt out before the control
system senses the change and takes any actions. A diagram of this situation is shown
below.

Large Time Delay

A simple example of a large time delay is the distillation column as outlined in the figure
below. If we use feedback control to regulate the purity of the top product, when the feed
composition changes (disturbance), the control system is not aware any takes no action
until the effects of the disturbance travels and arrives at the sensor position at the top.
When the controller takes the correction, the whole column may be far away from the
designed conditions.
The question of importance of either occurrence is defined in economic terms. In either
case, the principle concern is the existence of errors that have significant economic
consequences in the overall process operation. In these cases, feedforward control can be
used to deal with these disadvantages or inadequacies of feedback control.