Optimizing the placement and number of measurement points in heating process control

In this paper, a heating process control law with steam supply is designed for a fluid in a heat exchanger. The process is described by a linear hyperbolic equation of the first order with a nonlocal boundary condition with a time-delayed argument. The temperature of the supplied steam is found as a linear dependence on fluid temperature values at measurement points in the heat exchanger. Explicit formulas are obtained for the gradient of the objective functional of the control problem in the space of the feedback coefficients (parameters) of this dependence. A numerical scheme is developed for determining the feedback parameters based on these formulas. Finally, an algorithm is proposed for determining the rational (optimal) number of measurement points.