Digital Monitoring, Estimation and Control of Emulsion Copolymerization

The application of Kalman filtering theory to address the problem of composition control in emulsion copolymerization is investigated. Two different filter designs were implemented carrying out standard state and noise-adaptive state estimation. Satisfactory digital monitoring of the process was obtained with both schemes. The filter estimates were utilized by a deterministic controller regulating the monomer addition rates of the two monomers into a reactor operating in semicontinuous fashion. The quality control strategy was based on a model developed for the vinyl acetate (VAc)/ butyl acrylate (BuA) comonomer system. Real-time experiments demonstrated the efficiency of the approach to minimize drastically the compositional drift.