A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR DYNAMIC OPERABILITY ASSESSMENT

The interrelationship between a plant design and its closed-loop perfo rmance has led to an awareness that dynamic operability issues need to be considered at the plant design stage. This in turn motivates the n eed for systematic procedures whereby the operability of competing pla nt designs may be assessed. Particularly useful would be a measure of inherent plant operability, independent of controller type or tuning. A procedure for computing a measure of this type is presented in this paper. It utilizes e-parametrization as a representation of feedback c ontrollers which permits operability assessment to be posed as a conve x optimization problem; the solution of which represents the best achi evable performance for any linear feedback controller. The formulation of the method is presented and its application demonstrated through e xample problems.