SCALE-UP OF BATCH PROCESSES VIA DECENTRALIZED CONTROL

The economic environment in the specialty chemicals industry requires short times to market and thus the ability to develop new products and processes rapidly. This, in turn, calls for large scale-ups from laboratory to production. Due to scale-related differences in operating conditions, direct extrapolation of conditions obtained in the laboratory is often impossible, especially when terminal objectives must be met and path constraints respected. This paper proposes a decentralized control scheme for scaling-up the operation of batch and semi-batch processes. The targets to be reached are either taken directly from laboratory experiments or adjusted to account for production constraints. Some targets are reached on-line within a given run, while others are implemented on a run-to-run basis. The methodology is illustrated in simulation via the scale-up of a semi-batch reactor.