Fuzzy Logic Control of Temperature in Nitration Process

Abstract

Nitration reactions are those where an organic agent gets mixed with nitric acid. They are considered highly exothermic as the heat generated is enormously high. These reactions generally occur as a batch process. Heat and mass transfer must be closely monitored to maintain the process steadily and avoid an explosion. The thermal loss of control of the system can be avoided by maintaining the temperature below the critical point. Generally fast and highly exothermic reactions are commonly carried out in batch reactors to have better control of the heat. This paper is an extension of previous work [1]. In this Paper, a runaway reaction is considered to take place in a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) and mass and heat balance equations are designed to analyze the behavior of CSTR. Fuzzy logic-based control is designed to control the temperature of the runaway reaction below the critical point in the MATLAB software environment. The designed fuzzy control is compared with other intelligent controllers to evaluate its performance on a nonlinear system.