An Automated System for Control of Refrigerant Parameters in a Fractionating Plant

Introduction of automatic control systems for technological processes is an urgent task. For maintaining the fractionating plant refrigerant parameters, an automated monitoring and control system based on Russia-made programmable logic controllers (PLC) using a software developed in the freely available CoDeSys environment is proposed. The probability of use of shutoff-control valves with an electric drive and a stepper motor for controlling refrigerant flow rate and maintaining pressure in the fractionating column condenser is examined. Application of the control system enables reduction of refrigerant consumption in the fractionating plant operation process and maintenance of the key process parameters, which facilitates production of high-purity gases.