Trajectory tracking of exothermic batch reactor using NIR spectroscopy

The control of exothermic chemical batch reactors has received much attention in literature over the years for their increasing importance in manufacturing industries and also the unique quality control challenges that they provide. However, most of the control schemes proposed to deal with these challenges make use of models that implicitly control the product quality. For example it is assumed that a control scheme that successfully regulates the reactor temperature along an apriori calculated optimal profile should imply satisfactory quality trajectory control. In this paper it is shown that this assumption is not robust enough to deal with some kinds of disturbances that may occur during the batch. It is also shown that product quality control can be greatly improved by proposing a new control scheme that makes use of NIR spectroscopic measurements as feedback information for a quality control system. The results of two controllers using this scheme are compared with a more widely used implicit control strategy in two test cases with unmeasurable system disturbances.