Robust thermal stability for batch process intensification with model predictive control

Thermal runaways in exothermic batch reactors present major safety and economic issues for industry. Control systems currently used are not capable of detecting thermal runaway behaviour and achieve nominally safe operation by carrying out the reaction at a low temperature. Recently, improvements in safety and process intensity have been achieved by using Model Predictive Control (MPC) with embedded stability criteria. The reliance of this approach on accurate model predictions makes plant-model mismatch a crucial issue. The most common source of plant-model mismatch is uncertainty of model parameters. Scenario-based MPC and worst case MPC are used with stability criterion K and Lyapunov exponents in this work. The effect of all uncertain parameters on thermal runaway potential can be identified easily for simulations in this work. Hence, worst case MPC results in a computationally more efficient control scheme than scenario-based MPC, whilst ensuring the same extent of safety and process intensification. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.