Reference tracking of membrane distillation with PNMPC

Author: Martijn Bindels and Bart Nelemans  

Summary: In this technical paper the use of model predictive control is introduced. An example is given where practical nonlinear model predictive control (PNMPC) is used to minimize the error between the obtained and the reference distillate production. In PNMPC an objective function is minimized given the constraints of the process. In this case the objective function is to minimize the error between the measured and reference distillate production.  

The results indicate the PNMPC can be used for reference tracking. In this case only the reference trajectory was followed. However, the objective function can be very wide, and can even be changed to reduce the operating cost of the whole system. Therefore, PNMPC shows great promise in membrane distillation applications.

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