Parameters identification of a chemical tank: A case study

Even though a modeling of a chemical tank is, in our case, in principle the modeling of a heat exchanger and belongs to the classical tasks, there are always some phenomena in practice, which are either difficult or impossible to include into the model. This especially holds in case of the old devices, where these parasitic events can have quite a large effect and can degrade both the model and the control strategy. The chemical tank being dealt within this paper suffers from many unpleasant phenomena, making it hard to come up with a proper identification method and model. In this paper, several modeling and identification approaches applied to the industrial type of shell and tube heat exchangers are presented. The goal is to show that less complex model serves the purpose better than a complex model and is also suitable for model based control. The control of a heat exchanger has been treated in many papers using some of the “classical” control concepts. In contrary, we propose a predictive control scheme, which compared to previous control approach have saved 25% of energy.