Reactor control system performance

TABLE III COMPARISON OF CONTROL SYSTEM PERFORMANCE - FIRST REACTOR... 

Two other systems are connected to the protection system The technological protection of steam generators and its peripheral functions are included in the SAS function. The Reactor Control System (RCS) performs the regulating function to operate the reactor in a predefined diagram according the power of the reactor. This system replaces the existing ARM function. 

The SIMULAR, developed by Hazard Evaluation Laboratory Ltd., is a chemical reactor control and data acquisition system. It can also perform calorimetry measurements and be employed to investigate chemical reaction and unit operations such as mixing, blending, crystallization, and distillation. Ligure 12-24 shows a schematic detail of the SIMULAR, and Ligure 12-25 illustrates the SIMULAR reaction calorimeter with computer controlled solids addition. 

In this short initial communication we wish to describe a general purpose continuous-flow stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) system which incorporates a digital computer for supervisory control purposes and which has been constructed for use with radical and other polymerization processes. The performance of the system has been tested by attempting to control the MWD of the product from free-radically initiated solution polymerizations of methyl methacrylate (MMA) using oscillatory feed-forward control strategies for the reagent feeds. This reaction has been selected for study because of the ease of experimentation which it affords and because the theoretical aspects of the control of MWD in radical polymerizations has attracted much attention in the scientific literature. 

More recently [29] the microwave-mediated Biginelli dihydropyrimidine synthesis (Eq. 2) was reinvestigated using a purpose-built commercial microwave reactor with on-line temperature, pressure, and microwave power control. Transformations performed with microwave heating at atmospheric pressure in ethanol solution resulted in neither a rate increase nor an increase in yield when the temperature was identical to that used for conventional thermal heating. The only significant rate and yield enhancements were found when the reaction was performed under solvent-free conditions in an open system. 

As was mentioned above, every efficient application of microwave energy to perform chemical syntheses requires reliable temperature measurement as well as continuous power feedback control, which enable heating of reaction mixtures to a desired temperature without thermal runaways. Moreover, power feedback control systems that are operated in the most microwave reactors enable a synthesis to be carried out without knowing the dielectric properties or/and conductive properties of all the components of the reaction mixture in detail. On the other hand, temperature control during microwave irradiation is a major problem that one faces during microwave-assisted chemical reactions. In general, temperature in microwave field can be measured by means of ... 

In all of the above cases, a strong non-linear coupling exists between reaction and transport at micro- and mesoscales, and the reactor performance at the macroscale. As a result, the physics at small scales influences the reactor and hence the process performance significantly. As stated in the introduction, such small-scale effects could be quantified by numerically solving the full CDR equation from the macro down to the microscale. However, the solution of the CDR equation from the reactor (macro) scale down to the local diffusional (micro) scale using CFD is prohibitive in terms of numerical effort, and impractical for the purpose of reactor control and optimization. Our focus here is how to obtain accurate low-dimensional models of these multi-scale systems in terms of average (and measurable) variables. 

G Boundary/shear layer, W Wall of pressure vessel The wall boundary layer control system must protect the walls, while the whole reactor must match the specified performance and stability. 

Description The Vinnolit PVC process uses a new high-performance reactor (1), which is available in sizes up to 150 m3. A closed and clean reactor technology is applied thus, opening of the reactors is not necessary, except for occasional inspections. Equally important, high-pressure water cleaning is not necessary. All process operations of this unit are controlled by a distributed process control system (DCS). 

The control performance of the heat-integrated reactor-column system shown in Fig.. 5.9 deteriorates as the auxiliary rehoiler provides less and less heat to the column. The reason is that uncontrolled variations in the steam pressure of the waste heat boiler affect the heat supplied to the column. When these variations are of the same order of magnitude as the total heat supplied by the auxiliary reboiler, the latter cannot compensate properly for the variations. Part of the prob-... 

In critical cases it may well be worthwhile to make a complete analysis of stability. In many cases, however, enough can be learned by studying what Bilous and Amundson (B7) called parametric sensitivity. These authors derived formulas for calculating the amplification or attenuation of disturbances imposed on an unpacked tubular reactor originally in a steady state, with the idea that if the disturbances grow unduly the performance of the reactor is too sensitive to the conditions imposed on it, that is, to the parameters of the system. The effect of feedback from a control system was not considered. As pointed out by the authors, it would be a much more complicated task to apply their procedure to a packed reactor, but it still would entail far less computation than a study of the transient response. 

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