Comparison of PID control and linear model predictive control application to regenerative thermal oxidizer system

Process control applications have significantly contributed to the development of the industrial sector. A regenerative thermal oxidizer (RTO) is a treatment process of exhaust air. The system absorbs heat from the exhaust gas and uses the captured heat to preheat the incoming gas stream and destroy air pollutants emitted from process exhaust streams at high temperatures. In order to regulate the gas stream output, temperature control loop is an important requirement. Nowadays, temperature control of RTO is still using conventional PID control. Tuning of PID parameters are straightforward and simple, but its control performance is limited. Moreover, PID design for multi-input multi-output systems is complicated and cannot ensure the performance. This motivates the development of model predictive control (MPC) which is one of advanced process control techniques. This paper presents an application of PID control and model predictive control designed for RTO system. The performance of linear MPC is compared to PID control of RTO system. Effects of each control parameter are also obtained. Simulation results indicated that linear MPC provides better transient performance.