Composition estimator design for industrial multicomponent distillation column

The problem of on-line estimating on the basis of temperature measurements the distillate NC4 impurity in an industrial IC4/NC4 splitter (operating at Saras refinery at Sarroch in Italy) is addressed. The application of the adjustable model-based Geometric Estimation approach yields a dynamic data processor that adequately performs the estimation task in the light of a prescribed estimation tolerance with a scheme that is considerably simpler than the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) employed in previous studies. The implementation of the proposed estimator with experimental data shows that distillate NC4 impurity can be inferred with an uncertainty similar to the one of off-line occasional determinations.