Online monitoring of semi-continuous emulsion copolymerization: comparing extended Kalman filtering to feedforward calorimetry

Emulsion polymerization is widely used for producing polymer lattices for paints, coatings and adhesives. For more tailor-made copolymers, semi-continuous processes are employed allowing better control of polymer quality. To efficiently produce high quality polymers, a recipe optimization and good feedback process control is necessary. Unfortunately, most characteristic quality values cannot be measured online or measuring them incurs high cost and long time delays. In this paper, we develop an extended Kalman filter based approach for model based measurement of characteristic process data by measuring temperatures only. We compare this approach to earlier approaches based on simple feedforward calorimetry. We conclude that our approach is more exact and compensates disturbances, inaccurate curate conditions and plant-model mismatch better than the simple feedforward calorimetry