MODELING OF THE TRANSIENT AND STEADY STATE OPERATION OF A FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR WITH ADAPTIVE CONTROL OF TEMPERATURE

This paper concerns modeling of the transient and the steady state operation of a fluidized bed reactor for the catalytic ammoxidation of propylene to acrylonitrile. To maintain constant the temperature of the reaction in order to facilitate the phenomenological study as well as to avoid risks of destruction of the catalyst, a self tuning P.I.D. controller has been used. The controller derived from a discrete P.I.D. regulator is based on pole assignment. It uses a recursive parameter estimator based on the least square method. The reactor has been interfaced with an Apple II micro-computer. The results obtained illustrates the inherent capability of self adaptive control to adapt the change of the environment where conventional control fails

Modeling of the reactor is based on the Kato and Wen bubble assemblage model corrected by including the wake of the bubbles with their clouds, as proposed hy Stergiou. This modified model gives good predictions of the operation of the reactor for steady as well as transient operation.