Modelling and control of a three-phase catalytic slurry intensified continuous reactor

In this paper we propose a hierarchical two-layer approach for the control and optimization of a three-phase continuous chemical reactors. An optimization layer calculates the set points of an advanced nonlinear controller that is based on the concavity of the entropy function and the use of the thermodynamic availability as Lyapunov function. A knowledge based dynamic model of the process in the case of the catalytic o-cresol hydrogenation reactor is briefly described and closed-loop simulations are provided to illustrate the approach.