ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Model predictive control of a CSTR: A hybrid modeling approach

Michal Kvasnica, Martin Herceg, Ľuboš Čirka, and Miroslav Fikar

Institute of Information Engineering, Automation, and Mathematics, Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Radlinského 9, 812 37 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

E-mail: michal.kvasnica@stuba.sk

Received: 17 July 2009  Revised: 16 November 2009  Accepted: 23 November 2009

Abstract: This paper presents a case study of model predictive control (MPC) applied to a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR). It is proposed to approximate nonlinear behavior of a plant by several local linear models, enabling a piecewise affine (PWA) description of the model used to predict and optimize future evolution of the reactor behavior. Main advantage of the PWA model over traditional approaches based on single linearization is a significant increase of model accuracy which leads to a better control quality. It is also illustrated that, by adopting the PWA modeling framework, MPC strategy can be implemented using significantly less computational power compared to nonlinear MPC setups.

Keywords: model predictive control - piecewise affine model - CSTR

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.2478/s11696-010-0008-8

Chemical Papers 64 (3) 301–309 (2010)