Design and analysis of controllers for continous stirred tank reactor (CSTR)

Temperature is the most critical parameter of a chemical reactor and controlling the temperature of a chemical reactor is the most challenging task. This paper presents a comparative analysis of various controllers (PID, NARMA — L2 and LQG) designed for controlling the temperature of a Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR). The performance parameters considered for comparison are transient characteristics, steady state characteristics and performance indices of different controllers. The Step and Gaussian disturbance have been taken into consideration and applied on the CSTR to check the performance of different controllers. The objective of the controllers designed is specifically to suppress the effect of disturbances (Gaussian and Step) occurring in the reactor. The temperature control of CSTR is best achieved by Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG), which have suppressed the effect Gaussian disturbance on CSTR. It can be seen that by using LQG Controller the disturbance is almost eliminated. However, NARMA — L2 and PID also have considerable performance and are capable of suppressing the effect of disturbances on CSTR.