KINETIC INVESTIGATIONS OF COMPLEX-REACTIONS USING A CONCENTRATION-CONTROLLED RECYCLE REACTOR

The concentration-controlled recycle reactor (CCRR) is proven to be a powerful laboratory instrument and has found a wide spectrum of applications in chemical reaction engineering, mainly in statistically designed experiments. But for the study of complex reaction schemes, where a strong time variable character is accompanied by an intermittent output information device, an efficient controller is needed to predict the next state of the process. Such a predictive concentration controller based on the theory of an extended Kalman filter has been developed. The oxidative dehydrogenation of iso-butyraldehyde to methacrolein, with a gas chromatograph as a composition detector, has been selected as appropriate for the scopes of this study. No preliminary experiments were necessary and no manually corrective manipulations had to be employed to keep convergence. The main features of the proposed control strategy and its advantages as well as the limitations are discussed.