Study of Flooding in a Hanson mixer-settler extraction column

Based on the direct synthesis approach, this paper presents a simple PI tuning method. In the direct synthesis method, the controller is designed in such a way that a desired closed-loop transfer function is obtained. First, the process is approximated by an over-damped second-order plus dead time model. Considering a step change in the setpoint, it is shown that the desired step response can be obtained by suitably choosing the controller gain. Also, a good trade-off between performance and robustness can be achieved if the controller gain is appropriately adjusted. Illustrative examples including a practical application demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.

Keywords:

PI control , direct synthesis method , distillation column