Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2004, 43, 7209
7209
POLYMER REACTION ENGINEERING: MODELING, OPTIMIZATION AND CONTROL Preface This special issue contains papers presented at a meeting entitled Polymer Reaction Engineering: Modeling, Optimization and Control. This meeting was held at the Ecole Supe´rieur de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon, in Lyons, France, on Dec 1-4, 2003, and was part of the Seize` mes Entretiens du Centre Jacques Cartier. On behalf of the invited speakers and conference attendees, the conference organizers offer their sincere thanks to the Centre Jacques Cartier and, in particular, to its director, Alain Bideau, for making this conference possible. Their generous support made it possible to ensure the participation of a number of specialists from around the world. For more information on the Centre Jacques Cartier and its activities, one can visit their Web site at http://cjc.univ-lyon2.fr/. The need to manufacture products with specific properties in a reproducible, safe, and economically viable fashion constrains us to use advanced methods of process control, optimization, and models. The end-use properties of polymeric materials are particularly difficult to control given the distributed nature of the product, the variable reactivities of the different active species, and the complexity of the relationship between the final properties and kinetics. To control a process, one needs to have a representative model. In the event that a “perfect” model cannot be obtained, online monitoring of these properties becomes of major interest to implement a monitoring and control strategy. New online sensors, such as Raman and near-infrared spectroscopy, have, therefore, been adapted to monitor polymerization processes in order to obtain information about the process security and the evolution of the properties of interest. However, direct online measurements of a number (most!) of these quantities is very difficult, if not impossible, so it is extremely important to be able to rely on robust mathematical models of the process and robust estimation techniques, such as nonlinear optimization, neural networks, and high gain observer for nonlinear systems, to monitor the process. In reality, several process parameters are commonly fixed before the reaction begins (e.g., the initial concentrations of monomer and other reactants). However, there are still a large number of parameters that will need to be varied during the reaction for process supervision and property improvement. The complexity of the models of these processes along with the lack of online sensors represents a major challenge for control development. Advanced methods of control, such as nonlinear geometric control and nonlinear predictive control, are therefore applied to control these processes. For this reason, it was decided to organize a conference on the topic of Polymer Reaction Engineering: Modeling, Optimization and Control at the Ecole Supe´rieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon to discuss the state of the art of development in these areas. The goal of this meeting was, therefore, to bring together specialists from many different areas (reaction engineering, process control, material science, etc.) and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on different methods and approaches used for the modeling, monitoring, and control of reactors for the production of polymers. As the reader will be able to see from the selection of papers presented in this special issue of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, this objective was very well met. Participants from five continents presented a number of papers on the themes cited above, and the selection of work presented in the current issue of this journal gives a good cross section of the areas upon which the discussion was focused. Finally, on behalf of the co-organizers of this event, Professor Alex E. Penlidis of University of Waterloo, Professor Michel Perrier of Ecole Polytechnique de Montre´al, and Dr. Timothy McKenna of LCPP-CNRS, I thank all of those people who made this conference and this special edition possible. Also, special thanks go out to the editors of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research for their enthusiasm in helping make this special edition possible.
Nida Sheibat-Othman LAGEP, Universite´ Claude Bernard Lyon I, CNRS, 69616 Villeurbanne, France
Timothy F. McKenna* LCPP-CNRS/ESCPE-Lyon, 69616 Villeurbanne, France IE0401859 * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
[email protected]. 10.1021/ie0401859 CCC: $27.50 © 2004 American Chemical Society Published on Web 07/31/2004
