Control of a Batch Process
Practical Application of the Polynomial Toolbox in the film processing industry (the Kodak Corp.)
 

Huibert Kwakernaak1), Ronald E. Swanson2)

1) Signals, Systems and Control Department
Faculty of Mathematical Sciences
University of Twente
The Netherlands

2) Kodak Corporation

To download the application in .pdf format, click here.

           

Introduction
Design Targets
Theory
Process and Disturbance Models
Algorithm
Application to the Batch Process
Computation
Spectral Facrtorization
Two-sided Equation
The Controller
Response to Disturbances
Impulse and Step Responses
Assesments

Introduction
Many photographic films and papers are manufactured in a batch-like mode. In this mode batches of sensitized material are made up and then coated onto a base. To guarantee that the photographic properties are kept within limits, strips of product are regularly sent to testing for assessment. If the product is drifting off aim then it is possible to add dye or change the laydown to move the product back on target.

However, there frequently are more outputs than ”control knobs” to use for adjustment, and the inputs frequently affect many outputs simultaneously. Testing delay, more outputs than inputs, the desire for a first-order return rather than a step return to target for some products, and stochastic disturbances make this an interesting control problem.

Below is the transfer function plus disturbance model for a process like the one described above.

polyx: the polynomial toolbox 2.0

Here polynomial matrices is the delay operator and the polynomial equations are disturbance signals.

The three outputs polynomials, control design and signal processing successively are the deviations from aim of photographic speed, contrast, and upper density point. The two inputs control systems analysis and are dye and laydown changes from preset starting values, and the delay of three accounts for the zero order hold and testing delay.

The three disturbance models are first order integrated moving average, first order integrated autoregressive, and first order integrated moving average, respectively.

Design Targets
We look for a feedback controller that

Theory
A useful control design approach is the Internal Model Control (IMC) approach discussed in MacGregor and Harris (1987). Fig. 1 shows the arrangement.

The control law H for this problem follows by the minimization of a mean square error criterion of the form

E denotes the expectation, e(t) is the deviation of the output y(t) from its set point, and is the incremental control action. and are weighting matrices.

Fig. 1. Internal Model Control

Process & Disturbance Models
The control is computed by a polynomial algorithm. To this end, the plant-disturbance model is rendered as

with D(t) the effect of the disturbances on the output y. The process model is described by the right polynomial matrix fraction

with L and R polynomial matrices in the delay operator . The disturbance model is taken as

with v a column vector of white noise inputs. The quantities and are polynomial matrices in the delay operator, with diagonal, and

Algorithm
The first step of the algorithm is to find the approximate inverse model

for the plant. The polynomial matrix follows by the spectral factorization

The superscript * denotes the adjoint, that is,

The spectral factor needs to have all its roots outside the unit circle.

The controller H may now be expressed as

where the polynomial matrix T, together with the polynomial matrix P, is the solution of the two-sided equation

Application to the Batch Process Problem
To apply the algorithm to the batch control problem we need to obtain the process and disturbance models in the required form. Inspection of

reveals that

Furthermore, writing

we see that

The weighting matrices, finally, are selected as

Computation
The first step of the computation is to define the input data. Thus, the first few lines of the script demoB.m are

% demoB
% Script for the demo "Control of a batch process"

% Define the data
L = [-77*z^-3 0.33*z^-3; 0 0.03*z^-3; 0 0.1*z^-3];
R = eye(2,2);
theta = diag([1-0.6*z^-1 1 1-0.55*z^-1]);
Phi = diag([1 1-0.5*z^-1 1]);
d = 1;
Q1 = diag([0.01 8 2.25]);
Nabla = (1-z^-1);

Spectral Factorization
The first computational step is to determine the polynomial matrix by spectral factorization:

% Spectral factorization
Gamma = spf(L'*Q1*L);

The result is

Gamma

Constant polynomial matrix: 2-by-2
Gamma =
7.7 -0.033
0.00074 0.17

Solution of the Two-sided Equation
The next computational step is to solve the two-sided matrix equation  

for the matrices T and P. For this we use the routine axybc. This solves the two-sided polynomial matrix equation

To turn into a polynomial matrix equation we need to multiply it by a suitable power n of so that and both are polynomial and also is a polynomial matrix.

Choosing n = 3 we have

% Solution of the two-sided equation
n = 3;
A = z^-n*Gamma';
B = Nabla^d*Phi;
C = L'*Q1*theta;
[T,U] = axybc(A,B,C);

T turns out to be 2×3 matrix of degree 1, as predicted by the theory (MacGregor and Harris, 1987):

T =

-0.04 -0.00025 + 0.00012z^-1 -5.6e-005
-3.8e-006 2.6 - 1.2z^-1 0.59

The Controller
The controller transfer matrix is

where

is polynomial because is a constant matrix. We compute the controller as

% Compute the controller H = phi/theta
phi = R/Gamma*T;

The result is

phi =

-0.0052 0.065 - 0.03z^-1 0.015
-1.3e-016 15 - 7.1z^-1 3.4

Response to Disturbances
We study the effect of disturbances D(t) at the plant output such that

The closed-loop response to the disturbances D(t) follows from the sensitivity matrix S:

It is not difficult to find from the block diagram of Fig. 1 that if the plant model exactly matches the plant then

It follows that

where

Thus we add the lines

% Compute the sensitivity matrix S = psi/theta
psi = theta-L/Gamma*T;

Disturbance Impulse & Step Responses
The Control Toolbox and even more Simulink are very well equipped to compute, plot and manipulate time responses. We stay within the confines of the Polynomial Toolbox, however, and use long polynomial division to compute the impulse and step responses to disturbances (see the demo "Computing the covariance function of an ARMA process".)

Matlab produces the plot of Fig. 2 for the impulse response matrix. The step responses may be computed similarly and are shown in Fig. 3.

% Compute and plot the disturbance step response matrix s
% Apply long division to (psi/theta)*1/(1-z^-1)
n = 10;
[q,s] = longrdiv(psi,theta*(1-z^-1),n);

% Plot
figure; clf
k = length(s);
for i = 1:k
for j = 1:k
subplot(k,k,(i-1)*k+j)
plot(0:n,s{:}(i,j))
grid on; axis([0 n -1.5 1.5])
end
end

  • Fig. 2. Disturbance impulse response matrix

    Fig. 3. Disturbance step response matrix

    Assesment
    Inspection of the step response matrix shows this: