DMC-Expert Control of Gasoline In-line Blending Process

This paper proposes an advanced control strategy for gasoline in-line blending process to achieve tight control of octane quality for resultant gasoline. Specifically, the control law includes a dynamic matrix control (DMC) part to address the large delay mainly caused by the on-line octane analyzer, and an expert control part to calculate the flow of each blending gasoline. As demonstrated by experimental results for the blending process of a refinery, the developed blending control system exhibits such advantages as high precise control for octane quality of resultant gasoline, strong robustness over various uncertainties, and so on. It is expected that the designed control system will bring economic benefit for refineries by largely reducing gasoline blending cost.