ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Optimal control of a two-stage reactor system

T. Hirmajer and M. Fikar

Department of Information Engineering and Process Control, Institute of Information Engineering, Automation, and Mathematics, Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology, Slovak University of Technology, SK-812 37 Bratislava, Slovakia

E-mail: miroslav.fikar@stuba.sk

Received: 6 April 2006  Revised: 11 June 2006  Accepted: 19 June 2006

Abstract: Optimal operation policies were investigated for a batch reactor system with two different operation stages. At the end of the first nonisothermal stage one of the reactants was added. Since that moment the reactor was operated isothermally. In each stage behavior of the reactor was described by a set of differential equations. The maximum conversion problem was investigated subject to various operating constraints. Dynamic optimization based on the control vector parametrization was used to find the optimal control profile. Gradients of the resulting nonlinear programming problem were obtained by adjoint method based on the optimal control theory.

Keywords: dynamic optimization - control vector parametrization - batch reactor - hybrid systems

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.2478/s11696-006-0069-x

Chemical Papers 60 (5) 381–387 (2006)