A distillate composition estimator for an industrial multicomponent IC4-NC4 splitter with experimental temperature measurements

Abstract The problem of on-line estimating on the basis of temperature measurements the distillate NC4 impurity in an industrial IC4-NC4 splitter is addressed within an adjustable-structure Geometric Estimation approach, yielding: (i) suggestive sensor location guidelines drawn from detectability measures, and (ii) conclusive results obtained from estimator functioning assessment with simulated and experimental data. The resulting estimator performs the estimation task within an admissible error tolerance, and considerably less ODEs than the ones of the standard EKF technique employed in the majority of related previous studies.