First order controller for a petrochemical pyrolysis reactor

The objective of this paper is to design a real-time control solution for chemical processes, namely the ethylene reactor, the key-installation in the petrochemical industry. The controller used is lag or lead controller, a simple yet suitable control tool. This article deals with the problem of finding all first order controllers that stabilize a given LTI continuous time or discrete time plant and attain various performance specifications. The main tool for the controller design is Neimarks D-decomposition, which was originally introduced in 1949 in the Russian control literature. The process data have been measured from an assembly of pyrolysis reactors on the petrochemical platform from Pitesti, Romania.