Thermal evolution monitoring of a chemical reactor wall based on inverse analysis

Abstract

Thermal runaway phenomenon is one of the most common hazards in chemical engineering. For an arbitrary chemical reactor, the temperature evolution of the reactor and its thermal stress would be the last lines to avoid the accident. To obtain the thermal conditions without any known internal information of a reactor, a sequential method was employed along with the measuring temperatures on the outer surface of the reactor to inversely analyze the heat flux acting on internal surface numerically. Simulations were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of this method in the field of thermal evolution monitoring of chemical reactor. The key parameter, future time step r, is changed to test the performance of the inverse monitoring method. The monitoring results under different measurement noises demonstrate that this method has strong robustness to resist the noises. Further, different kinds of heat flux variations are assumed to simulate the unknown internal thermal conditions. The monitored results of the heat flux and temperature evolution have high accuracy with the exact ones.