Optimización y control de un proceso de mezclas Rundown para la fabricación de gasolinas

Commercial gasoline is a blend of components obtained from the crude oil distillation processes. The Optimization and Control system challenge is maximizing the profit by choosing the less expensive components blend, honoring the process constraints such blend properties, tank inventories, components availability and hydraulic constraints among others. The increasing competitiveness in the oil refining industry has led the blending process to be more and more complex, blending components are tend to be used directly from process units instead of using intermediate tanks (rundown blender), the additional economical margin is huge. This paper presents a simply but practical approach to address this blending process problems by emulating the cascade control strategy, two MPC controllers are cascaded to the optimizer algorithm. The good results obtained in the simulation stage have enabled applying the approach in a real blending process where the good performance of the method has been confirmed.