LAUSR

Abstract Thermal runaways cause significant safety issues and financial loss for industrial batch reactors due to the disruption of normal operation. The intensification of processes is restricted, since control systems are not capable of detecting stability boundaries of the system and hence are overly conservative. For this purpose Lyapunov exponents are introduced as a stability criterion. It is shown that Lyapunov exponents can correctly predict the stability of batch reactor systems. This stability criterion is embedded in Model Predictive Control, which results in a novel control scheme. This scheme allows the controlled increase of the reaction temperature to achieve a target conversion in a reduced completion time of reaction.