Optimal distributed load allocation and resource utilisation in evaporation plants

Abstract

This work aims to optimise the operation of an evaporation network with shared resources in real time. The goal is minimising the resource utilisation (live steam and cooling water) while satisfying a set of operational constrains. Hence, problems of optimal load allocation of feeds to plants and cooling-water distribution among them arise. The work bases on plants surrogate models, experimentally obtained, and analyses different formulation alternatives of the optimisation from the practical point of view: centralised vs distributed approaches. In particular for the distributed approach, we propose a problem decomposition which allows us to solve the problem in two iterative ways: 1) as two independent optimisations or 2) via price-coordination schemes.

Improvement of Mathematical Support and Implementation of Modern Criteria of Juice Quality in the Automated Process Control Systems at the Sugar Mill Evaporation Station

“…A sugar mill is described with the continuous energy and thermal processes. Both the energy efficiency of the entire sugar mill and the quality of the obtained products depend on the operation of the evaporator that distributes steam to other departments [3,4,5].…”

“…Then interfacial exchange of matter occurs during evaporation. Such processes are mass transfer, which leads to the need to control the qualitative and technological indicators of evaporation [3,4,5,6,7].…”

“…It is based on a rather complex method of calculating the thermal regime of the MES operation. This method uses a significant number of measured, calculated and tabular indicators, which, in turn, leads to a decrease in the efficiency of the evaporation and the APCS operation as well [3,4,11].…”

“…The use of mathematical software in the APCS to adjust the evaporation is mainly to solve problems of determining the effective quality functional. Based on the theory of optimal control, variants of construction of optimal speed systems and procedures of analytical design of optimal regulators were made out [3,12,13,14].…”

“…It can help to make the production more competitive and ensure appropriate product quality. To improve the efficience of the sugar mill technological complex operation it is advisable to supplement the automated systems with models, methods and algorithms for diagnosis and forecasting, which will allow real-time rapid detection, recognition and prediction of changes in the technological process [1,2,3].…”