Reducing energy cost through improved disturbance rejection

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Overview:
Two of the most popular architectures for improving regulatory performance and increasing profitability are cascade control and feed forward with feedback trim. Both architectures trade off additional complexity in the form of instrumentation and engineering time for a controller better able to reject the impact of disturbances on the measured process variable. These architectures neither benefit nor detract from set point tracking performance. This paper compares and contrasts the two architectures and links the benefits of improved disturbance rejection with reducing energy costs in addition to improved product quality and reduced equipment wear. A comparative example is presented using data from a jacketed reactor process.