The control design optimization of boiler mini plant in the workshop laboratory scale based on ratio control

A boiler is one of the crucial plants in the industry used to the combustion process. Due to its significant use, this boiler is designed on a workshop laboratory scale which aims for learning facilities. Three things that must be present in the combustion process are fuel, air and ignition. This boiler mini plant uses kerosene as fuel. Kerosene as a fuel in the combustion process has some disadvantages. The first, these disadvantages are the kerosene has a high price because of its rare existence. Second, kerosene is a liquid fuel that has lower heat energy than gaseous fuel, with HHV (High Heating Value) is 46,2 MJ/Kg and LHV (Low Heating Value) is 41,5 MJ/Kg. This fuel and air mass must be control to optimize this combustion process, commonly known as AFR (Air Fuel Ratio). Unbalanced values between air and fuel can be detrimental to this process, such as unreachable temperature to generate steam or hazardous exhaust gases. Based on this weakness of the boiler system, this research will propose the control design optimization of the boiler mini plant-based on ratio control. Boiler mini plant designed on the workshop laboratory scale. Due to the aim of the boiler mini plant as the combustion process, the control system must be designed in this plant. The control design optimization is the aim of this research based on ratio control. There are two methods in this research, use the calculation and simulate in HYSYS software. The result of the validation of the two methods proposed is 0.83%. The dynamics parameters from this response are 31.52 seconds of settling time, 7.03 seconds of rising time and 10.49% of maximum overshoot. From that result, the ratio control of the boiler mini plant has been successfully designed with AFR 21.9.