Process and Control Design for a Novel Chemical Heat Exchange Reactor

A new chemical reactor, the Open Plate Reactor (OPR), is being developed by Alfa Laval AB. It has a very flexible configuration with distributed inlet ports, cooling zones and internal sensors. This gives the OPR improved control capabilities compared to standard chemical reactors in addition to better heat transfer capacity. In this paper, we address the relationship between the process design, the number of actuators used and how to use these actuators in feedback control to be able to use the full potential of the OPR. The performance of the OPR can be significantly improved by using additional inlet ports and cooling zones. However, this may also require multivariable control methods to actually achieve this improvement in presence of model uncertainty and disturbances