Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, the dynamic behavior and control of the low pressure methanol synthesis fixed bed reactor have been investigated. For simulation purpose, a heterogeneous one-dimensional model has been developed. First, the reactor simulation is carried out under steady-state condition and the effects of several parameters such as shell temperature, feed composition (especially CO2 concentration) and recycle ratio on the methanol productivity and reactor temperature profile are investigated. Using the steady state model and a trained feedforward neural network that calculates the effectiveness factor, an optimizer which maximizes the reactor yield has been developed. Through the dynamic... 

This paper concerns non-linear state estimation in a batch polymerization reactor where suspension polymerization of methyl methacrylate takes place. A kinetic model proposed in the literature is selected and its validity has been verified through an experimental set-up. Based on this model monomer conversion and average molecular weights of the polymer are estimated using only one output measurement (reactor temperature). The performance of the estimator, which has the structure of an extended Kalman filter, is examined through simulation and experimental studies in the presence of different levels of parameter uncertainties. The effects of adding 'fictitious noise' and parameter state' to... 

PID controllers have been used for many years in industry and if a controller is well tuned, its performance is acceptable for many industrial processes. When the operating point is changed, due to nonlinear behavior of most processes, the controller should be retuned. In this regard, several self-tuning PID controllers are proposed in the literature. In this paper, four such algorithms are compared through simulation and experimental studies. In the simulation study, the effects of factors such as process pole locations, non-minimum phase behavior and model changes on the performance of the schemes are investigated. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that one of the schemes... 

The present work addresses chaos synchronization between two different general chaotic systems with parametric and structural uncertainties, subject to external disturbances and input dead-zone nonlinearities. In this regard, a novel robust controller has been designed that guarantees asymptotic stability of synchronization errors and boundedness of all closed-loop signals. One advantage of the proposed controller over the existing control algorithms is using only one update law for estimating the structural uncertainties, external disturbances, and unknown characteristics of the dead-zone nonlinearities, which reduces the computational burden considerably. The designed controller is... 

To reduce the sulfur content of crude diesel, several sets of experiments have been conducted using electrochemical oxidative desulfurization technique using electrolyte of NaOH at different applied voltages. Due to impacts of operating parameters on desulfurization, kinetic study is pursued and it is found that the kinetic follows a second order reaction rate with a high accuracy. The reaction of desulfurization was modeled using COMSOL and followed by coupled electrochemical oxidation-extraction, while the extraction process was particularly performed using process simulator. The effects of different solvents on extraction performance were studied and dimethyl sulfoxide was selected for... 

In many cases, multiple-fault diagnosis of plant-wide systems based on steady-state data is impossible. To solve this problem, a new diagnosis strategy based on neural networks has been proposed. In the suggested framework, the neural network is used as the diagnoser trained by a hybrid set of steady and dynamic characteristic data of the system. The dynamic characteristic data include overshoot and undershoot values of measured variables and their corresponding occurrence times. To evaluate its performance, the proposed scheme was used in the diagnosis of the concurrent faults of the Tennessee Eastman (TE) process. Various combinations of concurrent faults were considered in this... 

This work concerns with experimental investigation of CO2 WAG injection to light crude oil in near miscible conditions which has been rarely attended in the available literature. Here, several core flood experiments at three constant injection rates and four WAG ratios are conducted on sandstone rocks saturated with light crude oil in presence of saline water. The results showed that higher injection rate has a better performance regarding oil recovery for smaller PVs of injected fluids, while lower injection rate showed higher ultimate recovery for a 30% increase in injected PVs. Secondary continuous gas injection showed a superior performance than all the other WAG injections in different... 

In this work, design of an adaptive finite-time fault-tolerant controller for a class of uncertain multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear switched systems with unmodeled dynamics subject to asymmetric time-varying output constraints and unknown faulty input nonlinearities has been addressed. The number of actuator faults can be infinite. In addition, the proposed control algorithm can cope with different unknown types of input nonlinearities namely, saturation, dead zone, backlash, and hysteresis. Actuator faults and input nonlinearities can be different in different modes. To estimate the system uncertainties, neural networks (NNs) have been employed and the unmodeled dynamics has been... 

In the present work, a fuzzy supervisory control approach combined with an adaptive model predictive controller (AMPC), has been proposed to maximize the productivity of an anaerobic digestion (AD) process, while keeping the operation stable. In the proposed hierarchal control strategy, the set-point of the inner loop is provided by a supervisory controller. In the inner loop an AMPC has been applied to achieve the desired methane production rate by manipulating the feed flow rate. The AMPC is designed based on the auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) model whose parameters are updated at each sampling time to make the controller more robust against uncertainties and external loads. In the... 

Neural networks have been used for process fault diagnosis. In this work, the cluster analysis is used to design a structurally optimized Probabilistic Neural Network. This network is called the Clustered-Based Design Probabilistic Neural Network (CBDPNN). The CBDPNN is capable of diagnosing the faults of nonlinear processes operating over several regions. The performance and training status of the proposed CBDPNN is compared to a conventional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that is trained on the whole operating region. Simulation results indicate that both schemes have the same performance, but, the training of CBDPNN is much easier than the conventional MLP, although it has about 50% more... 

The radical chlorination of polyethylene was carried out in perchloroethylene solvent using chlorine gas and ultraviolet photoradiation to investigate a reaction kinetics model. The recurrent structure of chloromethylene (-CHCl-) and methylene (-CH 2 -) groups and the percentage of substituted chlorine were determined using hydrogen-nuclear magnetic resonance (H-NMR) (500 MHz) spectra. A kinetics model has been proposed for this reaction in which the conversion of methylene (-CH 2 -) units to chloromethylene (-CHCl-) units was considered to be the main reaction step. The simplified version of the obtained kinetics model indicates that the reaction is first order with respect to the chlorine... 

An experimental study was conducted on the desulfurization of non-hydrotreated kerosene with oxidation followed by liquid-liquid extraction. Various types of solvents including acetonitrile, methanol, and ethanol have been examined in the extraction of oxidized sulfur-containing compounds of kerosene. The performance of these solvents has been carefully examined and compared. It was found that their performance follows the order: acetonitrile > methanol > ethanol. The effects of number of extraction stages and solvent to kerosene ratio on the desulfurization and recovery of kerosene have been investigated. The experimental results show that for all three solvents, solvent/kerosene ratio and... 

The desulfurization of non-hydrotreated gas oil using oxidation followed by liquid/liquid extraction has been studied. The solvent extraction of oxidized sulfur- containing compounds of gas oil was carried out by utilizing various types of solvents, including acetonitrile, methanol, and 96 vol.-% ethanol. The performance of these solvents was carefully evaluated and compared by considering both desulfurization and gas oil recovery. It was found that their performance follows the order: acetonitrile > methanol > 96 vol.-% ethanol. The influences of operating conditions, such as number of extraction stages and solvent to gas oil ratio, on the desulfurization and recovery of gas oil, were... 

In order to convert the postconsumer polyethylene to a valuable product, chlorosulfonation of virgin and highly degraded polyethylene has been carried out in the solution phase under atmospheric pressure. Produced chlorosulfonated polyethylene samples from virgin and degraded HDPE are compounded and cured at different temperatures and their mechanical properties are determined. The results show that degradation of used polyethylene does not have noticeable negative effects on the final mechanical properties of produced chlorosulfonated rubbers. Therefore, it can be concluded that chlorosulfonation can be considered as an effective new method for polyolefin recycling  

In this research the radical chlorination reaction of polyethylene has been carried out in perchloroethylene solvent under atmospheric pressure, using chlorine gas and UV light. In order to characterize the structural configuration of chlorinated polymer and study the reaction rate, different samples have been taken in equal periods of time during the reaction time. The FT-IR and H NMR spectra of these samples have been recorded and interpreted. The sequences of methylene groups between two subsequent chloromethylene groups in the polymeric chains have been determined through H NMR spectra and the obtained results have been confirmed with the data of some model compounds. The relative... 

In this work, forced-convection heat transfer of magnetic-sensitive nanofluids has been investigated in the presence of rotating magnetic field. In this regard, the laminar, Newtonian, incompressible, and two-dimensional (2D) fluid flow in a horizontal duct subject to constant wall temperature boundary condition was modeled. Moreover, the fluid was supposed to be non-electrical conductive and the magnetic field source comprised of two time varying components perpendicular to each other. Influences of magnetic field intensity and frequency, inlet fluid velocity, and spin viscosity on the forced-convection heat transfer of the magnetic nanofluids were investigated. It was found that the... 

Macroporous styrene-divinylbenzene copolymers with different degree of crosslinking were prepared by suspension polymerization in presence of different binary mixtures of toluene and heptane, as diluent. Specific surface area, bulk and apparent densities, and pore volume of the resulting beads were determined experimentally. Applying the least square method to the experimental data, correlations for prediction of these properties were obtained. Effects of divinylbenzene concentration, diluent to comonomer volume ratio, and composition of the diluent mixture were considered in developing the aforementioned correlations. The influence of the reaction recipe on porous structure of the samples... 

In this work, application of CO2 saturated with silica nanoparticles in continuous/water alternating gas (WAG) injection for heavy oil recovery was investigated which has been rarely attended in the available literature. Core displacement tests were conducted to monitor heavy oil recovery in both continuous and WAG injection schemes. It has been observed that for continuous nano-saturated CO2 injection, the oil recovery is higher than pure CO2 injection. This observation might be explained by alteration of rock wettability to a more water-wet condition. In WAG injection scheme, water breakthrough happened later in nano-saturated CO2 than pure CO2 injection. This delayed water breakthrough...