Impact of Control Strategy on Chemical Process Dynamic Flexibility Performance: A Switchability Analysis Application

Control strategies performances are usually assessed based on well-established indicators. These ones are accurately selected according to the property of the dynamic closed loop response to be optimized. During the last decades, flexibility has become an aspect of major interest in process industry due to the need to deal with market volatility, renewable energy sources and biomass based raw materials. That is why, in the perspective of a unified approach for design [1], scheduling and control, recent studies have coupled flexible process unit and control strategy design. In this research work, an innovative switchability index, recently proposed in literature, is then applied on chemical process case studies with the purpose of assessing the impact of dynamics under uncertain operating conditions and test different control strategies from a flexibility point of view. The outcome of this study successfully proves that the provided indicator is suitable both for the comparison of different control strategy for a given design from a dynamic flexibility perspective and the assessment of the required unit oversizing for a given switchability target.