A Comparison of Automated Techniques in Determining Candidate Attainable Regions. A Case Study: The Water- Gas-Shift Reaction

We use Attainable Region (AR) techniques to generate reactor network synthesis solutions to the WGS reaction system. We do this using the conventional method as described by Nicol et al. (1997) to generate the candidate AR (AR) for exothermic reversible reactions in three dimensions. We compare the results with two other automated techniques, namely: the isostate algorithm (Rooney et al. 2000) and the DSR algorithm (Seodigeng et al., 2003). The DSR algorithm implements constant control of mixing and reaction policies in a steady state differential sidestream reactor. Here, we find that the DSR algorithm addresses the problem of determining ARs for higher dimensional problems. For the WGS reaction it was found that the DSR algorithm did not find a new candidate. However, a good approximation to the WGS candidate region was found under a minute with minimal user intervention.