ONLINE ESTIMATION OF REACTION-RATES IN SEMICONTINUOUS REACTORS

State estimation techniques are used to on-line estimate reaction rate s in well-mixed semicontinuous reactors. The proposed scheme assumes t he availability of on-line measurements of the total mass of the react ants in the reactor, and copes with the lack of knowledge of the react ion rate dependence with concentration. Concepts from system theory ar e used to reduce the degrees of freedom that the pure Kalman filtering design produces. By the use of three examples of semicontinuous emuls ion copolymerization, it is shown that accurate estimates of the react ion rates are possible in the presence of inaccurate measurements of t he incoming flow rates and much earlier than the establishment of the pseudo-steady-state condition. The proposed technique is applied to th e experimental data collected during the semibatch polymerization of t he following ternary systems: (a) acrylonitrile-ethyl acrylate-N-methy lacrylamide and (b) butyl acrylate-styrene-acrylic acid.