A CLOSED LOOP APPROACH TO TANK REACTOR MODEL SIMPLIFICATION

Abstract Stirred tank reactors are widely used in the chemical process industry and in many of them there are problems and constraints related to the temperature control. In order to achieve a model suitable for temperature control of such a system a number of ad hoc assumptions and approximations are generally made. Here, a method to systematically evaluate the validity of such simplifications based on the resulting performance of the controlled closed loop system is proposed. The method is applied to a two-compartment model of a reactor with an exothermic reaction. It is then shown that many standard assumptions are reasonable but some assumptions are clearly not advisable because of possibly deteriorated closed loop performance.