Process Improvement for a Semi-batch Reaction System

A. MARCHETTI; M. AMRHEIN; D. BONVIN

2005-04-01

2005-09-01

Química

Quimica

Swiss company Lonza wanted to improve the performance of a complex reaction system in production from batch to batch. Since an initial product, an intermediate product of the synthesis and the final product were unstable and explosive under certain conditions, the reaction was being operated under conservative conditions, i.e. slow feeding to ensure a low concentration of the intermediate product. This led to long batch times that caused a bottleneck for the overall process. The objective of the collaborative project between Lonza and the Laboratoire d’Automatique of EPFL was to investigate the use of a process-improvement approach to speed up the development phase. The first phase of this project comprised the modeling and simulation of the reactor based on experimental data from laboratory and calorimetric experiments. Also, a deterministic parameter estimation was carried out.