Computers & Chemical Engineering, Vol.24, No.2-7, 931-936, 2000
A study on the evaluation and improvement of structural controllability of chemical processes
The control performance in a chemical process does not depend on the controller but also on process structure itself. Therefore, dynamic characteristics of a process should be considered at the design step before control system design is fixed. Controllability means the dynamic characteristics of a process itself to operate safely without violating constraints to achieve various design objectives in the presence of uncertainties. Structural information may give insights into the pathways of disturbances in the process. In this study, a simple controllability evaluation and improvement procedure is suggested to screen out design alternatives using relative order analysis and structural decomposition and to improve the controllability. By comparing the results from the proposed method with the case of dynamical simulation, the effectiveness of the proposed method was shown.