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Stochastic multi-objective economic model predictive control of two-stage high consistency mechanical pulping processes

University of British Columbia

Model predictive control (MPC) has attracted considerable research efforts and has been widely applied in various industrial processes. This thesis aims at developing economic MPC (econ MPC) strategies to optimize and control the nonlinear mechanical pulping (MP) process with two high consistency (HC) refiners, which is one of the most energy intensive processes in the pulp and paper industry. It possesses substantial economic motives and environmental benefits to develop advanced control techniques to reduce the energy consumption of MP processes. We propose four econ MPC schemes for nonlinear MP processes. Firstly, assuming that all the state variables are directly measurable, two different econ MPC schemes are proposed by adding different penalties on the state and input to ensure the closed-loop stability and convergence. Secondly, to address the issue of state variable off-sets from the steady-state target induced by above schemes, we further propose a multi-objective economic MPC (m-econ MPC) strategy. An auxiliary MPC controller and a stabilizing constraint are incorporated into the econ MPC. The stability of econ MPC is then achieved by preserving the inherent stability of the auxiliary MPC controller. Thirdly, to remove the assumption that all state variables are measurable, a moving horizon estimator (MHE) is employed to estimate the unmeasurable states. We then propose a practical framework integrating the m-econ MPC and MHE. Finally, we develop a tractable approximation for stochastic MPC (SMPC) to handle uncertainties associated with state variables. It can largely reduce the conservativeness or numerical instability incurred in robust or chance constraints of the traditional SMPC. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is validated by simulation examples of a nonlinear MP process consisting of a primary and a secondary HC refiner. It is shown that the proposed m-econ MPC schemes can significantly reduce the energy consumption (approximately 10\%-27\%) and guarantee the closed-loop stability and convergence. Therefore, the proposed methodology presents a great promise on practically implementing m-econ MPC to save costs for MP processes.

Text

2020-03-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/73798

Chemical and Biological Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/