Closed-loop dynamic behavior of an industrial high-efficiency FCC unit

Although the control of an FCC plant includes all the hardware components of the process, it is at the FCC reactor-regenerator system that the control is the most critical. This is mainly due to the strong interaction between the reactor and regenerator units. As a result, the reactor-regenerator system presents a highly nonlinear behavior and is therefore a challenge for control tasks. This paper presents a brief introduction to the control of a high-efficiency FCC unit and the implementation of the main regulatory control loops in the reactor-regenerator system of a real Portuguese industrial high- efficiency FCC unit. Moreover, closed-loop dynamic simulations performed with a model previously developed by the same authors, are compared to industrial dynamic data from step tests done in GalpEnergia FCC unit showing that this FCC simulator can realistically represent the closed-loop dynamic behavior of a real industrial operating unit. Therefore, this dynamic model has a great potential to be used as a reference model for advanced model-based control and real-time optimization purposes.