Non-linear model based control of a propylene polymerization reactor

A modified generic model controller is developed and tested through a simulation study. The application involves model-based control of a propylene polymerization reactor in which the monomer conversion and melt index of the produced polymer are controlled by manipulating the reactor cooling water flow and the inlet hydrogen concentration. Non-linear control is designed using a simplified non-linear model, in order to demonstrate the robustness of the control approach for modeling errors. Two model parameters are updated online in order to ensure that the controlled process outputs and their predicted values track closely. The controller is the static inverse of the process model with setpoints of the measured process outputs converted to setpoints for some of the state variables. The simulation study shows that the proposed controller has good setpoint tracking and disturbance rejection properties and is superior to the conventional generic model control and Smith predictor control approaches.