Input and Output Disturbance Rejection and Noise Attenuation in Crude Oil Distillation Column Using a Filtered Generalized Predictive Control Algorithm

Distillation column is one of the most important units of an oil refinery¡ that operates based on differences in boiling points of crude oil constitutes. Performance of more units after the column directly depends on its operation¡ and any disturbance instantly affects its performance in other refinery units. Therefore¡ designing an appropriate controller able to deal with input and output disturbances for distillation process is very important. The main objective of the distillation column control is to maintain product compositions within their set points and reduce energy consumption.To serve this purposes¡ the controller should be able to identify the states of the system and predict disturbances and noise of the process continuously. Furthermore¡ it should be able to deal with the problem resulted by multiple delay and high interactions existing among different control loops. With regards to ability of the developed predictive controllers to control the multivariable systems with multiple time delay¡ this strategy is followed in this paper. Moreover¡ a low-pass filter is considered in the predictive model to reject the effect of input and output disturbances and reduce the noise effect on process. The functionality of the proposed system is validated by simulation study that show strong performance in noise attenuation and disturbances rejection.