Heat Exchanger Performance and Stability Improvement Using H2 Synthesis Control Design Technique

Abstract

The heat exchanger is a device that helps to circulate calculated amount of heat in a system. It can be applied in order to reduce the number of heat sources while maintaining a precise level of heat. Heat exchanger is expected to be part of the solution to CO2 emission and climate issues since its application reduces the sources of heat and cost of production such as in electrical power plant. Due to the critical need for the solution to the enormous emission of CO2 and the need to reduce cost of running power plants, the study and improvement of the heat exchanger has become very important.  The heat exchanger suffers from disturbances due to its harsh environment. In order to maintain desired performance the heat exchanger requires an adequate control measure. Many types of controllers have been designed, however from the review it was observed that most of the controllers produced marginal stability which will not maintain good performance of the system in the presence of significant disturbance. The major objectives of this work are to reduce the tracking error for performance improvement, to reduce the peak sensitivity for better disturbance rejection and to improve the stability margins for stability robustness. In this work, an optimal robust control was developed for the heat exchanger using H2 synthesis technique. From the results, the controlled system trajectory tracking error and overshoot were reduced to zero and the peak sensitivity to disturbance was reduced to 0.189 dB. Gain and phase margins satisfied the robust stability characteristics; gain margin was greater than 20 dB and phase margin was greater 60 dB. This means that the designed optimal controller will guarantee robust performance and stability of the system even in the presence of large disturbance.