Temperature control in an exothermic continuous stirred tank reactor

A continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is a batch reactor fortified with an impeller or additional mixing device to provide resourceful mixing.  In chemical engineering, the name CSTR is often used to describe an idealised agitated tank reactor used to model manoeuvre variables necessary to achieve a specified output. Most chemical plants have a process involving a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR), and it has more nonlinearity in real-world implementation due to disturbances like change in surrounding temperature, non-uniformity in mixing, and change in the temperature of the coolant. The aim of the work is to study the dynamic behaviour of a continuous stirred tank reactor with coolant flow rate as input and reactor temperature as output and to design a suitable controller to control the temperature of the continuous stirred tank reactor by conducting an exothermic reaction in real-time. A continuous stirred tank reactor was modelled with the help of a transfer function model in the MATLAB environment. For controlling the temperature of the reactor fluid, the design of proportional integral derivative, proportional integral derivative (PID) – particle swarm optimization (PSO), proportional integral derivative (PID) – artificial bee colony optimization (ABC) and model predictive control (MPC) controller were carried out. The simulation results show that model predictive control has better tracking performance compared to conventional PID, PID–PSO or PID–ABC.