This
work proposes the use of solar radiation as energy source
to support energy demands in the optimal control process for ethanol
production. The control system proposed for the reactor has two layers:
the local one composed by PID (Proportional-Integrative-Derivative)
controllers for the pH, level, and temperature loops of the reactor
and the master controller which uses an advanced MIMO (Multiple-Input
and Multiple-Output) MPC (Model Predictive Control) strategy. The
control of the solar cooling system is performed by means of a switching
control scheme. Since there is no availability of a practical system
which integrates the experimental solar cooling plant and a fermentation
unit, the Hardware in the Loop technique has been performed on the
plant of Centro de Investigación de Energía Solar (CIESOL),
located at the University of Almería (Spain), interconnected
with a simulator that represents the ethanol fermentation in Brazilian
factories. Three scenarios are analyzed in detail, in which the increments
in ethanol production are shown.
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