A strategy for supervisory control of batch reactors: an experimental study

摘要

The temperature control of batch reactors lies on the ability of the heating/cooling system which fits them to realise properly the required heat transfer. Among the main thermal systems used in industry, the multi-fluid system remains the most encountered. The automation of this particular heating/cooling system requires to choose on-line the utility fluid to be injected into the jacket Therefore, a supervisory control procedure for the automatic handling of utility fluid changeovers is necessary The proposed supervisory control is based on the on-line computation of the maximum and minimum temperatures on a future horizon which can be reached for every utility fluid available on the batch reactor pilot-plant. These limit temperatures are computed by means of a dynamic model based on heat and mass balances. Once the utility has been selected, its appropriate flowrate is computed by means of a Non-Linear Model Predictive Control algorithm using the same dynamic model. Different experiments have been carried out on a 12 litter pilot-plant to demonstrate performance and efficiency of this supervisory strategy and they yielded promising results.