Monitoring Batch Polymerization Using Cumulative Amount Changes

CARLOS R. ALVAREZ; ADRIANA BRANDOLIN; MABEL C. SÁNCHEZ; LUIS PUIJGANER

Lyon –France

Congreso; European Symposium on Computer Aided Chemical Engineering; 2008

CAPE Working Party of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering

 Batch processes are naturally time-varying; therefore their dynamics should be taken into account, for example, in terms of variable correlations, auto-correlations, and variable cumulative changes. In this sense, classical monitoring strategies have incorporated information related to variable correlations and auto-correlations. But little attention has been devoted to the fact that both, the mass of each species and the energy suffer global changes during the batch operation. In this work a monitoring strategy which incorporates this issue is presented. Measurements are combined to define a new set of variables, which enable us to follow the cumulative changes in reactive species, and in the energy exchanged and contained in the system. The proposed methodology is applied to monitoring the operation of an emulsion polymerization semi-batch reactor. Results are compared with those obtained using a classical Multiway Principal Component Analysis (MPCA) monitoring technique, and conclusions about the impact of considering the cumulative nature of this kind of processes are presented.