Strategies to Control Thermal Runaway

Increase the flow rate of a cocurrent cooling fluid. 

Employ a cooling fluid that undergoes a strongly endothermic reaction. 

Rednce the inlet temperature of a countercurrent cooling fluid. 

1 Plug-Flow Mass Balance That Neglects Axial Diffusion 

At high-mass-transfer Peclet numbers, the steady-state mass balance for component i, with units of moles per time, is expressed in terms of its molar flow rate Fi and differential volume dV = ttR dz for a tubular reactor. If species i 

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Equation 8.27 assumes that the batch time tp can be discretized into NU time intervals, where the feed flow rate is kept constant Tp represents the desired copolymer composition ki are the weighting functions or the relative importance of controlling the instantaneous copolymer composition, when compared to controlling the final residual monomer. (As discussed previously, the proposed control strategy may lead to thermal runaway, if serious heat transfer limitations are present. If this is the case, the energy balance must be included in the model and constraints should be imposed on temperature values and temperature profiles.) The process model can be written as... 

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