Fault-tolerant control of a polyethylene reactor

Fault-tolerant nonlinear control of a gas phase polyethylene reactor was studied. The feed to the reactor consisted of ethylene, comonomer, hydrogen, inerts, and catalyst. A stream of unreacted gases flowed from the top of the reactor and was cooled by passing through a heat exchanger in counter-current flow with cooling water. Initially, a family of candidate control configurations, characterized by different manipulated inputs, were …