J

Surge tank control in a cane raw sugar factory

S Crisafullia, & R.D Peirceb

I.

Introduction

This paper presented a new control scheme for raw sugar production process. The
experiment was done at the Victoria Mill raw sugar factory in Australia. In the processing of
sugar cane, it is needed to remove suspended solids from the cane juice. The most common way
of treating these undesired solids is by clarification. The steps at which the sugar bearing juice is
treated is known as Juice Circuit.
The problem in the old scheme was that there is a large variation of flow rate into the clarifier,
increasing the exiting stream of the Juice circuits turbidity, decreasing in the clarifiers
efficiency and thus lowering the quality of sugar. Crisafulli and Peirce, modeled a new process
scheme that would steady the flow rate of the inlet stream into the clarifiers.
II.

Summary

It is without saying that the quality of the sugar greatly depends on the quality of the
operation of the Juice circuit of the plant. The Juice circuit that is efficient will have the
advantage in the market.
Traditionally, the solution for rapid varying flow rate was to install buffer tanks with large
capacity relative to the mass flow of the cane juice thus lowering the variation. Though, it was

found satisfactory in low factory throughput, it is not the same for larger ones. It should follow
that for larger throughput, larger buffer tanks should be installed but the capital cost would be
high that finding more sophisticated process control would be more favorable.
The newly modeled process was based from the feedforward control. The principle is to
measure the disturbance factors of the plant and use the information to compute a control signal.
The difference between this and the output feedback control is that the disturbance is propagated
first then control action is implemented to the output.
The previous scheme applied the simplest approach which is to use a unity gain-only level
controller, but it did not provide satisfactory performance due to the insufficient surge tank
capacity.

Figure 1: Schematic Diagram of the old process scheme

The advantage of the approach over the feedback control is that the feedforward controller
does not wait for the effect of a disturbance to propagate to the output before it can take action,
and hence greater control of surge tank capacity can be achieved.
The main technical control objective was to lessen the rate of change of the secondary mixed
juice flow. At first, the control of this variable is not affected by the primary mixed juice flow
and can be achieved by considering the combination of the two surge tanks as essentially being

one capacity. Since there is wide range of variation in the inlet of the primary mixed juice tank,
the surge tank capacity should be used. The feedforward controls involves measuring the flow
rate of the inlet to the primary mixed juice tank and then maintain the secondary mixed juiced
flow at some moving average value. This is illustrated in Figure 2 and cascade control loop is
included for further increase in effectiveness.

Figure 2: feedforward control block diagram including a cascade control loop

There are two basic ways of connecting a series of two tanks, as interacting capacitites and as
non-interacting capacities . According to the paper, Interacting tanks offer a greater effective
capacity than non-interacting configuration. Thus, the control of the primary mixed juice flow
has been modeled such that it actively interacts

Figure 3: Schematic diagram of feedforward control scheme

Figure 4: Steady state trends of secondary mixed juice flow, primary mixed juice tank level
and secondary mixed juice tank level as percentages of maximum values for the previous level
control based scheme

Figure 5: Steady state trends of secondary mixed juice flow, primary mixed juice tank level
and secondary mixed juice tank level as percentages of maximum values for the new
feedforward control based scheme.

III.

Critique

000000000It is good that in doing their new control sc.0..heme; they study the process in
detail first to fully understand it.

They explained the concepts of the previous and the proposed control scheme for the process.
They have explained the clarifier's mechanism that the variations in the inlet flow rate will
reduce the clarifier's efficiency in creating quality sugar

They do modeling of the process that will aid in improving process knowledge and resulted
in a set of programs that were used in simulation programs. The good thing here is that a number
of previous control schemes were applied to the model and marginal stability problems were
replicated with good agreement to the plant data. In other words, the improvement of the new
strategy is in sync with the actual process.

Although they did not provide any accurate quantified control from the benefits of the new
system, they stated that the feed forward control system is used to measure or estimate the main
plant disturbances but they did not specifically mention these plant disturbances.

They also did not present a comparative economical report for introducing a larger tank
capacity to the new control scheme which we found intriguing for them saying that the price for
the new scheme is lower.

The new control scheme project study became a training ground for future engineers since,
the journal stated that the workers and researchers came from different universities and they held
a healthy collaborations

IV. References

1. F.G. Shinskey, Process Control Systems, McGraw-Hill, Singapore, 1979.

2. G. Stephanopoulos, Chemical Process Control: An Introduction to Theory and
Practice, Prentice-Hall International, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984.
3. S. Crisafulli, The Design and Implementation of a Novel Control Scheme for
an Industrial Plant, Honours Thesis, James Cook University, Dept. of Electrical
and Electronic Engineering, 1988.