Disturbance Decoupling of Staged Processes

The Disturbance Decoupling Problem (DDP) is concerned with identifying situations in which the process outputs can be isolated from the effects of input and state disturbances. Many chemical processes do not satisfy the conditions for the existence of a disturbance decoupling controller. One class of processes which is amenable is that of "staged chemical processes". In this paper, the DDP is reviewed, and the structural characteristics of staged processes that enable the solution of the DDP are identified. The results are illustrated using a number of distillation column examples.