Edinburgh Napier University

  An industrial web process has been studied and it is shown that the underlying physics of such processes governs by the Navier-Stokes partial differential equations with moving boundary conditions, which in turn have to be determined by the solution of the thermodynamics equations. The development of a two-dimensional continuous-discrete model structure based on this study is presented. Other models are constructed based on this model for better identification and optimisation purposes. The parameters of the proposed models are then estimated using real data obtained from the identification experiments with the process plant. Various simulation tests for validation are accompanied with the design, development and real-time industrial implementation of an optimal controller for dynamic optimisation of this web process. It is shown that in comparison with the traditional controller, the new controller resulted in a better performance, an improvement in film quality and saving in raw materials. This demonstrates the efficiency and validation of the developed models.