Temperature control of highly exothermic batch polymerization reactors

✍ Scribed by H. Ni; K. Debelak; D. Hunkeler

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 272 KB
• Volume: 63
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0021-8995
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4628(19970207)63:6<761::aid-app8>3.0.co;2-l

✦ Synopsis

In this article a highly exothermic batch polymerization reactor is considered. The reactor is simplified as a mixing tank with the internal heat generation treated as a disturbance. A fuzzy-hybrid-PID-feedback (FH-PID) control structure is developed in which the output of fuzzy hybrid portion is used to adjust the set point of a PID controller to compensate for the effect of the major disturbance, the heat of reaction. In this way, the hybrid portion of the controller does not influence the stability of the original PID control system. A fuzzy model was constructed to estimate the heat of reaction inside the fuzzy hybrid block. The fuzzy parameters of the hybrid portion do not depend on the process model and can be estimated from the transient response obtained with a conventional PID controller. This FH-PID control strategy has been applied to the temperature control of batch solution and batch inverse emulsion polymerizations of acrylamide in a 1 gallon pilot scale reactor. The results show that this fuzzy hybrid-PIDfeedback control strategy improves the control performance of the batch polymerization reactor.