Time-Delay Identification and Validation of a Liquid Film Transport Model based on Pilot Plant Experiments⁎⁎The authors thank GEA Wiegand GmbH for financial support and for providing data used in this paper.

The paper presents an identification strategy to obtain relations between time delays of a transport model for an evaporating liquid film and corresponding flow/liquid properties. To this end, step-response based pilot plant experiments referring to the falling film evaporator process are conducted. In this context, the time-delay relations are identified offline by minimizing the output error between the model and experiment. In subsequent validation experiments, we observe that modeled and measured outputs are in good accordance. Within this framework, we conclude that the influence of evaporation on the liquid’s time-delay behavior can be neglected.