Abstract
The dividing wall column (DWC) has significant energy saving potential compared to conventional column sequences. However, to reach these savings in practice, it is essential that the control structures can track the optimal operation point despite inevitable changes in feed properties, performance characteristics and other uncertainties. Otherwise, the energy consumption may rise significantly or, more commonly, the DWC becomes unable to produce pure products even at its maximum reboiler duty. Extremum seeking control (ESC) is a model-free optimisation technique that may mitigate off-optimal operation in this environment. By active perturbation of selected manipulative variables, the algorithm infers gradient properties of the measured cost function and, by that, enables tracking of a moving optimum. Extremum seeking control can be used also in combination with other approaches, e.g. self-optimising control. Applied to the DWC, the presented perturb-and-observe algorithm, which can be classified as ESC, appears to be able to track changes in the optimal values of the manipulated variables and setpoints.