Air separation units is a kind of complex chemical equipment for producing gaseous and liquid oxygen, argon and nitrogen, and the products of it are widely used in steelmaking, chemical engineering, food processing, semiconductor fabrication and other fields. Nevertheless, its safe and effective operation is still a challenge for the characteristic of high nonlinearity and the requirement of frequent load change.

Recently, Tao ZOU and his research team at Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed an automatic load change coordinated control system for air separation units, to realize safe and effective operation. The study was published in Control Engineering Practice.

To solve the tight coupling problem resulted from high thermal integration and material recycling, researchers come up with a robust control strategy based on loosely coupled model and priority setting of controlled variables. For the nonlinearity caused by wide-range frequent load change, they present an incremental load balancing calculation method based on neural network. Finally, researchers integrate a nonlinear hysteresis control strategy for the oxygen compressors into the whole controller to realize the automatic load change coordinated control of the air separation units.

The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Plan and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The automatic load change coordinated control system of air separation units (Photo provided by Tao ZOU)

Contact:

Tao ZOU

Email: zoutao@sia.cn