Despite being a simple dehydration reaction, the industrially relevant conversion of lactic acid to acrylic acid is particularly challenging. For the first time, the catalytic cracking of lactide and poly(lactic acid) to acrylic acid under mild conditions is reported with up to 58 % yield. This transformation is catalyzed by strong acids in the presence of bromide or chloride salts and proceeds...

The catalytic cracking of methane over nickel gauze is proposed as an attractive alternative for the production of CO-free hydrogen. The catalyst deactivates due to intensive coke deposition. Therefore, the reactor was operated periodically with the reaction followed by the catalyst regeneration by burning of coke in oxidative atmosphere. The optimal reaction performance was found to consist of...

In this article, we use a genetic algorithm to obtain an economically optimal preventive maintenance frequency for different equipment, the parts inventory policy (number and type of spare parts to keep in stock), and labor allocation in process plants. To assess cost, we improved a previously published Monte Carlo simulationbased maintenance model (Nguyen et al. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2008, 47(6...

A general fault accommodation system is proposed in this paper. Detailed accommodation strategies are presented for different types of faults. A combination of different diagnostic techniques involved in collective problem solving is used in the diagnosis module. A pseudomeasurement based Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to perform the fault parameter estimation task for differential and al...