μ-optimal advanced PID control of an industrial high purity distillation column

State-space controllers are difficult to implement in a distributed control system. Therefore a control design based on the common PID control structure is desirable. This paper presents the μ-optimal tuning of advanced PID control structures as well as a simple feedforward control design for an industrial binary distillation column. The design is based on an optimization approach. The resulting controllers guarantee stability and a high performance for the entire operating range of the distillation column. A summary of the practical experiences complements the theoretical results