HEAT EXCHANGER PROCESS CONTROL

Introduction

Heat exchanger system is widely used in chemical plants because it can sustain wide
range of temperature and pressure. A heat exchanger is a device in which heat exchange
takes place between two fluids that enter and exit at different temperatures (Classification of
Heat Exchangers, 2017). The main function of heat exchanger is to either remove heat from
a hot fluid or to add heat to the cold fluid (Heat Transfer/Heat Exchangers - Wikibooks, open
books for an open world, 2017). So temperature control of outlet fluid is of prime importance.
The direction of fluid motion inside the heat exchanger can normally categorised as parallel
flow, counter flow and cross flow. In this experiment, to control the temperature of outlet
fluid of the heat exchanger system, a conventional of PID controller is used. The designed
controller regulates the temperature of the outgoing fluid to a desired set point in the shortest
possible time irrespective of load and process disturbances, equipment saturation and
nonlinearity (Yang, Liu, & Sun, 2011).

A shell-and-tube exchanger is used for larger flows, which are very common in
chemical process industries. The design of this exchanger is a shell with a bundle of tubes
inside. The tubes are in parallel and a fluid flows around them in the shell. Each arrangement
allows for a different type of flow such as co-current, counter-current and cross flow. The
tube-side can have one or more passes to increase the energy exchange from the tube-side
fluid. The shell-side may contain baffles, or walls, that channel the fluid flow and induce
turbulence, and thus, increase energy exchange.

Figure1: Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger Controller System in Industry

 To diminish the overshoot and enhance the control performance, a feed forward
controller is utilized alongside with a feedback controller. The combined impact of feedback
and feed forward control plans gives a greatly improved outcome than the input PID
controller. This is because the created internal model based PID controller has demonstrated
84% improvement in the overshoot and 44.6% improvement in settling time as compared to
the classical controller (Fridman, & Mahajan, 2014). Besides, there can be two types of
disturbances in this process. Firstly is the flow variation of input fluid and the secondly is the
temperature variation of input fluid. So, in feed forward control loop, the input fluid flow is
measured and the disturbance in the flow is controlled using a feed forward controller. The
output of the feedback and the feed forward controller is added and the resultant output is
given to the control valve (Khare, & Singh, 2010).

To control the exit temperature of the heat exchanger system a classical feedback
controller is used. Most of the PID tuning rules developed in the last sixty years use
frequency-response methods (Kiam Heong Ang et al. 2005). Examples include, Ziegler
Nichols rule, symmetric optimum rule, ZieglerNichols complementary rule, some-
overshoot rule, no-overshoot rule, refined ZieglerNichols rule, integral of squared time
weighted error rule, and integral of time absolute error rule (Myungsoo Jun & Michael G.
Sofonov, 1999). Usually, initial design values of PID controller obtained by all means needs
to be adjusted repeatedly through computer simulations until the closed loop system performs
or compromises as desired.
Reference

1. Classification of Heat Exchangers. (2017) (1st ed.). Retrieved from

http://web.iitd.ac.in/~pmvs/courses/mel709/classification-hx.pdf
2. Heat Transfer/Heat Exchangers - Wikibooks, open books for an open world.
(2017). En.wikibooks.org. Retrieved 1 April 2017, from
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Heat_Transfer/Heat_Exchangers
3. Yang, X., Liu, T., & Sun, J. (2011). Optimal PID Control of Heat Exchanger
Temperature. Advanced Materials Research, 204-210, 21-24.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/amr.204-210.21
4. Fridman, E., & Mahajan, H. (2014). Heat Transfer Virtual Lab for Students and
Engineers (1st ed., pp. 55-60). Momentum Press.
5. Khare, Y., & Singh, Y. (2010). PID Control of Heat Exchanger System. International
Journal Of Computer Applications, 8(6), 22-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5120/1213-1742
6. Kiam Heong Ang, Gregory Chong and Yun Li, PID Control System Analysis,
Design, and Technology, IEEE transaction on control system technology, vol. 13, no.
4, 2005, pp. 559-576
7. Myungsoo Jun and Michael G. Sofonov, Automatic PID Tuning: An Application of
Unfalsified Control, IEEE Symposium on CACSD, 1999, pp. 1-5.