On Chip Refiner Control

On a chip refiner, the incremental gain between the motor load and the plate gap is subject to sudden changes due to pad collapse. Passive adaptive control with fault detection, active suboptimal dual control and dual control solutions are discussed. For the latter, the choice of the control criterion is crucial as it must reflect the peculiarities of the process. Two non- quadratic performance indices are proposed, and the myopic solutions computed. Simulations show the superior performance offered by those ladices. Future work will concentrate on the computation of the dual controller corresponding to these indices.