(27f) Applying Attainable Regions to Scheduling

The Attainable Region (AR) method has been used to optimize the structure of steady flow reactors. It was shown that in cases where the plug flow reactor trajectory was not convex there were potentially opportunities for improving the performance of the reactor system by introducing more complex optimal reactor structures. In this work we will show how the AR method can be used to optimize batch reactors.

It is shown that there is a relationship between the optimal structure of a steady flow reactor system and the optimal operating and control policy of a batch system. This means that in the case where the kinetics leads to a concavity in the batch reactor trajectory, there are potential opportunities to increase the production rate in the batch reactor.

We show how we can use a simple graphical approach to determine the optimal production rate as well as operating policy to achieve this. It is shown that by running a batch reactor according to the optimal policy, that there are potentially large gains to be made in the production rate compared to running the batch reactor in a more standard mode.