Jacket Temperature Control of a Batch Reactor Using Three Different Temperature Levels

Abstract

In the pharmaceutical, fine chemical, polymer and food industry, where high value-added products are manufactured, insufficient control might produce off-grade products. This can cause significant financial losses, or in the pharmaceutical industry, it can result in an unusable batch. In these industries, batch reactors are commonly used for the manufacturing of intermediate and final products. The control of these reactors is essentially a problem of temperature control. In the industry, an increasing number of heating–cooling systems utilizing three different temperature levels can be found. Although they are advantageous from an economic point of view, it makes the control more complicated. A pilot unit of such a system can be found in the authors’ laboratory, which contains a monofluid thermoblock with three different temperature levels. It is a useful experimental facility to test control algorithms for industrial use. This paper describes a split-range algorithm that can be used as part of the jacke...