The development of a MPC controller for a heat integrated fluid catalytic cracking plant

The use of the advanced control techniques is necessary because, now, the PID control is no more competitive in the 20% of the industrial applications when special dynamics are involved. By implementing an advanced control system one can push the process unit to a more profitable region without affecting the operation constraints. In previous works an industrial FCC plant from a Romanian refinery was studied from the point of view of heat integration and steady state performance of the new heat exchanger network (HEN) design. In this study the improvement of the same FCC plant was done by implementing an advanced control scheme capable to maintain stabilized the heat transfer through the plant. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is one of the most used advanced control techniques in process control. A MPC controller was developed for an industrial fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) plant using Aspen HYSYS. The developed MPC controller results enable to establish that the strategy of the advance control imposed is a very efficient one in case of a FCC heat integrated plant.