Abstract :
The effect of material recycle and heat integration on the dynamics and control of chemical processing
plants is considered. In analogy to linear control theory, one may consider how plant interconnections
affect the fundamental properties of the dynamics, such as the poles and zeros. This implies that recycle
of mass and energy, which are feedback mechanisms, affects the poles and thus possibly the plant stability,
whereas parallel interconnections in a plant affect the zeros and thus the achievable performance of
the plant under feedback control.
