A comparative investigation on the heat-release estimation methods for temperature control of a batch polymerization reactor

In a batch reactor for the methyl methacrylate polymerization (MMA), temperature control was studied. Three methods of heat-release estimation (HRE), namely, kinetic model (KM), online energy balance (OLEB) and calorimetric-state estimator (CSE) were investigated. The following three criteria were used to assess these methods: (i) Ability to adjust kinetic errors. (ii) Ability to adjust against dynamic errors. (iii) Sensitivity to temperature noises. The results indicate that the CSE method has a better performance with respect to kinetic and dynamic errors. Additionally, by using this method, the temperature control design becomes self-tuning.