Black-Box Modelling of Ethyl Acetate Reactive Packed Distillation Column

Abstract

The development of two black-box (ARX and ARMAX) models for ethyl acetate reactive packed distillation process has been carried out in this work. The data used for the model development were generated by performing an experiment in a pilot plant using a unit step change in reflux ratio, a feed ratio of 1 and a reboiler duty of 560 W. The model orders used for the estimation of the model polynomial coefficients were determined by optimizing the Rissanen’s Minimum Description Length criterion with the aid of MATLAB 7.12.0. The good agreements between the experimental and each of the ARX and ARMAX simulated top segment temperatures of the column have revealed that the models can be used to represent the process successfully. Furthermore, ARMAX model was discovered to be better in performance because of its higher calculated fit value but the ARX model was faster in getting to the steady state when a step input was applied to both models