2.6. THE REACTOR, SEPARATOR AND RECYCLE PLANT
(A) Control the reactor holdup (and let the recycle flow float)
(B) Control the recycle flow (and let the reactor holdup float).
In case (A) one may encounter the so-called ”snowball effect” where the recycle goes to
infinity. This occurs because at infinite recycle flow we have ...&%liwhich gives the highest
possible production. In effect, the snowball effect occurs because the reactor is too small to
handle the given feed rate, so it is really a steady-state design problem.
Luyben (1992, 1994) has studied liquid phase systems and has concluded that control
strategy (B) (or a variant of it) with one flow fixed in the recycle loop should be used to
avoid the ”snowball effect”.
Wu and Yu (1996) also study the snowball effect for the reactor/separator and recycle plant. They propose as a remedy to the snowball effect to distribute the “work” evenly between the different units. To achieve this they suggest to
(C) Control the reactor composition constant.
Also in this case the reactor volume varies depending on the disturbance.
However, from an economic point of view one should usually for liquid phase systems keep the reactor level at its maximum value, Chapter 4. This maximizes the conversion per pass and results in the smallest possible recycle, which generally will reduce the operational cost. Thus, the recommendation of Luyben (1992, 1994) and (Wu and Yu, 1996), has an economic penalty which it seems that most researchers so far have neglected.
On the other hand, for gas phase systems, there is usually an economic penalty from
compression costs involved in increasing the reactor holdup (i.e. the reactor pressure), and
strategy (B) where we let the holdup (pressure) float may in fact be optimal. Indeed, such
schemes are used in industry, e.g. in ammonia plants. For example, for processes with gas
recycle and purge, Fisher et al. (1988a) recommend to keep the gas recycle constant at the
maximum value. For a simple gas phase plant and the recycle plant we have shown that the
economic optimum does not coincide with the maximum recycle flow, Chapter 5.
Wolff et al. (1992) studied a similar plant. They included an inert component and looked on the effects of recycle on the controllability of the process. Their conclusion is that the purge stream flow should be used to control the composition of inert. They did not consider the reactor holdup as a possible controlled variable.
All the above works have in common that the authors are searching for the right controlled variables to keep constant (recycle flow, reactor volume, composition, etc.). However, a common basis for comparing the alternatives seems to be lacking. In terms of future work, we propose that one first needs to define clearly the objective function (cost) for the operation of the reactor system. Only when this is given, may one decide in a rigorous manner on the best selection of controlled outputs, for example by using the idea of “self-optimizing” control and evaluating the loss. This is done in a systematic manner Chapter 4 and 5.