Precision control of refinery feed-heater temperature using fuzzy algorithm

The authors present an easily implementable control strategy using a fuzzy algorithm for refinery feed-heater temperature control. The feed-heater exhibits large amounts of transportation lag making all conventional control methods inadequate. A fuzzy algorithm for real-time implementation was successfully developed and tested using a process model on an IBM PC. This fuzzy control algorithm is based on intuition and experience and can be regarded as a set of heuristic decision rules. Simulation results indicate that the controller can be applied to dead time and nonlinear processes