Model reduction and identification for temperature control of the phenol-formaldehyde reaction in batch reactors

This study provides an overall strategy for building an effective model-based control scheme for the highly exothermic phenol-formaldehyde reaction for the production of 1,3,5-methylolphenol, a phenolic resin precursor, carried out in a jacketed batch reactor. A simplified representation of the reactive system is proposed by means of reduced kinetic models, whose unknown parameters are identified with a two-step procedure. The experimental data, used for model identification, have been simulated using a complex reaction network, involving large number of reactions and compounds. The proposed simplified models are adopted to design a model-based feedback control scheme for the temperature control in a batch reactor. The obtained performance is tested in simulation and compared to those obtained via a classical PID controller. According to simulations, it can be stated that the model-based controller always achieves the best performance with respect to the PID controller and the robustness of the control sc...