On the Optimal Operation of the Open Plate Reactor

In this paper the application of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to a chemical reactor, namely the Open Plate Reactor(OPR), is considered. It is designed a control strategy which allows a safe start-up operation of the reactor and provides an easy handling of system restrictions and nonlinearities originating from the process dynamics. An efficient parameterization of control signals are proposed to reduce the size of the optimization load at each sampling instant and to tolerate slower computational time resulting from NMPC optimization problem. It is shown that the NMPC algorithm is developed with satisfactory results and the reduced open loop parameterization results in a sufficiently rich closed loop behavior.