A dividing
wall column (DWC), characterized by multivariable control,
strong nonlinearity, and highly coupled systems, shows effective distillation
capacity with a significant reduction in energy consumption and capital
cost. Although multivariable control strategies for DWCs have attracted
certain attention from both academia and industry, relatively little
work has focused on data-driven multivariable controllers for such
a complex system that is not easy to model. In this work, a novel
different-factor full-form model-free adaptive controller (DF-FFMFAC)
is first proposed for DWCs aiming to solve the problem of simultaneous
control of the liquid level, column pressure, and temperature channels
with quite different characteristics between them, which may be a
challenging task for the prototype FFMFAC. Taking such complex dynamics
into account, a parameter selection technique for the DF-FFMFAC based
on neural networks is also developed, where gradient descent for the
neural network is improved by the full-form dynamic linearization
technique utilized in the DF-FFMFAC. Furthermore, the stability of
the parameter tuning process is guaranteed by Lyapunov theory. The
present work makes a noteworthy contribution to the multivariable
control of DWCs in a purely online data-driven way without any offline
training procedure and mathematical information. In terms of the separation
of an ethanol–n-propanol–n-butanol DWC, the controller is cosimulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK and
Aspen Plus Dynamics and tested against a series of feed flow rate
and feed composition disturbances. As a result, the proposed method
achieves encouraging control performance with smaller oscillations
and faster responses compared with model predictive control and proportional–integral–derivative
controllers, proving to be a promising data-driven method for the
multivariable control of DWCs. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed
scheme for the practical control of DWCs in the presence of measurement
noise has also been demonstrated by adding white noise to the simulation.