A hybrid approach to empirically test process monitoring, diagnosis and control strategies

Abstract

Testing strategies for process monitoring, diagnosis and control is expensive, and usually requires either complex pilot plant facilities or to deal with the hard constraints posed by experimentation in real plants. The experience developing hybrid system in the chemical processing area is discussed and its application to flotation columns is presented. The main idea is that the essential phenomena underlying a process can be divided in two aspects: the hydrodynamics (mixing and separation) and the physicochemical changes. The first can be experimentally implemented in pilot plants where the main streams are mixed and separated, at a low cost. However, to follow the process changes it will require expensive instrumentation, store facilities, chemical reagent consumptions. The use of physics and chemical models, coupled with operating measured variables describing the hydrodynamics, are proposed as an economical convenient substitute of experimentation in real processes. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.