Multi-Scale Control of Bunsen Section in Iodine-Sulphur Thermochemical Cycle Process

Abstract

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2017. Hydrogen is considered as an environmental friendly energy carrier but its actual impact on the environment depends on the way it is produced. A strategy of plant-wide modelling and advanced process control with optimization is currently developed for the Hydrogen production via the Iodine-Sulphur thermochemical cycle process. The objectives of this paper are two-folds: (1) to optimize the trade-off between steady-state profitability and dynamic operability of the Bunsen section subject to multiple constraints, and (2) to design practical control strategy based on the multi-scale control concept. A multi-scale modelling for the Bunsen section in the Hydrogen production via the Iodine-Sulphur thermochemical cycle process is presented. Based on this multi-scale model, a practical control design is developed and applied to Bunsen section. The suitable sets of control variables and manipulated variables are chosen via a sensitivity study incorporating the multivariate Response Surface Analysis method. By dint of simulation study, it can be shown that the proposed control strategy is able to produce a good closed-loop performance where its robustness depends strongly on the selected schemes of Bunsen section. It is worth highlighting that, the proposed multi-scale control strategy demonstrates robust performance in the face of the worst case uncertainty scenario.