Improved economic operation of MSWC plants with a new model based PID control strategy

\u3cp\u3eMunicipal solid waste combustion (MSWC) plant operators are currently under an increasing pressure to optimize the economic performance of their plants. A route with high potential for optimizing this performance is by improving the performance of the MSWC plant combustion control system, which typically is of the PID-type. In this paper, motivated by the industrial need to improve the overall economic MSWC plant performance, a model based approach is taken to optimize this control system, using recently derived black and white box MSWC plant models. More specific, from a closer analysis of the dynamics of these models a new PID-type of MSWC plant combustion control strategy is derived. It is shown that this new control strategy has improved setpoint tracking properties compared to PID-type of combustion control strategies typically encountered in the industry. As a result, a significant improvement of the economic performance of an MSWC plant will be obtained when replacing such a control strategy for the new one. However, no improvement of the disturbance rejection properties of existing PID-type of combustion control strategies has been observed with the new control strategy, which would also lead to a significant improvement of the economic performance of an MSWC plant, indicating that other, non-PID, types of combustion control strategies are required for that.\u3c/p\u3