Polymerization reactors, modeling continuous industrial

Modeling and Control of Continuous Industrial Polymerization Reactors... 

Control of industrial polymerization reactors is a challenging task because, in general, control engineers lack rigorous polymerization process knowledge, process model, and rapid online or inline sensors to measure polymer properties. Exothermic polymerization processes often exhibit strongly nonlinear dynamic behaviors (e.g., multiple steady states, autonomous oscillations, limit cycles, parametric sensitivity, and thermal runaway), particularly when continuous stirred tank... 

Some of the equations commonly used to predict molecular weight distributions in batch step-growth polymerizations are introduced below, and then, in subsequent sections, some more specialized equations used to predict reaction rates and molecular weight development in models of continuous reactor systems of industrial interest. 

Mitra et al. (1998) employed NSGA (Srinivas and Deb, 1994) to optimize the operation of an industrial nylon 6 semibatch reactor. The two objectives considered in this study were the minimization of the total reaction time and the concentration of the undesirable cyclic dimer in the polymer produced. The problem involves two equality constraints one to ensure a desired degree of polymerization in the product and the other, to ensure a desired value of the monomer conversion. The former was handled using a penalty function approach whereas the latter was used as a stopping criterion for the integration of the model equations. The decision variables were the vapor release rate history from the semibatch reactor and the jacket fluid temperature. It is important to note that the former variable is a function of time. Therefore, to encode it properly as a sequence of variables, the continuous rate history was discretized into several equally-spaced time points, with the first of these selected randomly between the two (original) bounds, and the rest selected randomly over smaller bounds around the previous generated value (so as... 

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