Synthesis and Soft Implementation of Supervisory Control Scheme in an Industrial Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) Unit of a Nigerian Refinery

Abstract

In this paper, a self-tuning hierarchical controller in which a Fuzzy logic controller supervises the control actions of a conventional PID has been proposed, implemented and presented. The controller has been applied to a control study of Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCC) unit riser temperature, and regenerator temperature respectively. Performance comparison of the proposed Fuzzy-PID controller and the conventional PID was made in simulation studies of regulatory and servo performances of the two controller types. Six performance measures: Percent overshoot (OS), settling time (ST), integral absolute error (IAE), integral square error (ISE), integral time absolute error (ITAE) and integral time square error (ITSE) were employed as the tools for performance comparison between the conventional PID and the Fuzzy-PID controller. For the tracking of riser temperature with a set point at 524oC, the performance indicators under PID control gave the following results overshoot (14.5%); settling time (40 seconds) Integral absolute error (8.246), integral square error (3.3); integral time absolute error(1762);integral time square error (43.77) while for the same indicators under Fuzzy-PID control the following values: overshoot (3.3%); settling time (40 seconds) ;Integral absolute error (8.811); integral square error (14.5); integral time absolute error(280),;integral time square error (31.11) .The results allude to the superiority of the fuzzy-PID scheme over the PID scheme in tracking the optimal set point of riser temperature. More so, for tracking the regenerator set point temperature of 746oC, comparative study of step response under the two schemes gave the following results in six performance indicators: overshoot (PID(12.6%)/Fuzzy-PID(6%)); settling time (PID(80 seconds)/Fuzzy-PID(20seconds));Integral absolute error(PID(14.29)/Fuzzy-PID(8.63)); integral square error(PID(6.713).Fuzzy-PID(4.506)); integral time absolute error(PID(2858)/Fuzzy-PID(305.9)), integral time square error (PID(77.55)/Fuzzy-PID(33.05)).Moreover, the fuzzy-PID controller also showed superior performance over the conventional PID controller in terms disturbance rejection (regulatory response) of both riser and regenerator temperature. The results from this study suggest that the application of fuzzy-PID scheme to temperature control offers good promise of improved fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) operations.