A Novel Approach of Control Design of the pH in the Neutralization Reactor

This paper deals the with design of a control strategy which will effectively control the level of pH in a neutralization reactor in the whole range of pH. The process consists of a continuously stirred tank, where aqueous solutions streams of acetic acid and of sodium hydroxide are mixed together. The main challenge of a successful control strategy for this process arises mainly from its non-linear behavior. The paper will show how to handle such non-linearity efficiently by introducing an augmented output and an optimization based control. Simulation results will be given to demonstrate the behavior of the proposed control strategy. Comparison between an optimal based controller and a simple PI controller is discussed.