Application of reduced order phenomenological model to pH nonlinear control

Changes in process sensitivity with pH make the design of the conventional controllers difficult. pH processes are very hard to control because of strong nonlinearity and usually time varying characteristics. A lot of work has been done in the field of phenomenological modelling of the pH processes. However, there is a need to simplify the model to have it suitable for control purposes. This follows from the fact that the internal model for the controllers must be as simple as possible. Wiener models consisting of a linear dynamic element followed by a static nonlinear element are considered to be perfect to represent a wide range of nonlinear processes. The proposed reduced order phenomenological model of pH has a similar form as the Wiener models but includes bilinear reduced order phenomenological dynamic element. This model was validated using the real world pilot plant. The possibility of combining the phenomenological and arbitrary approaches occurred. The aim of this paper is to present reduced order model of pH process which can be used for simulation purposes and to design process model based controller.