Distillation columns have many well-known advantages in separating mixtures. However, they use large amount of energy. Dividing-wall column (DWC), as a result of recent development in process intensification, is an innovative solution to this problem. Despite of all benefits of DWC, lack of understanding of its operation and multivariable system with high interactions among the DWC’s variables make its practical application limited to few companies. In this paper a DWC column is studied and a control structure with self-optimizing control concept is devised. The objective is to achieve a plantwide control structure which leads to near optimal steady state operation with using minimum singular value (MSV) rule. The proposed control structure has economically optimal operation to produce high purity product in addition to stable dynamic response.

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