Dynamics and control of high duty counter-current heat exchangers

In this paper, we analyze a class of high duty counter-current heat exchangers. A high duty counter-current heat exchanger is modeled by two first order stiff PDEs, which show a potential of multi-time scale dynamics. Using singular perturbations, a non-stiff reduced model capturing the slow time scale dynamics is derived. Input/output linearizing controllers are derived based on both the full model and the reduced model, and the advantages of using the controller based on the reduced model are documented via simulations.