On-Line Monitoring of Tubular Microreactors Using Particle Filter

Worldwide research has clearly demonstrated the application potential of micro chemical process (MCP) technologies. A number of technical requirements for stable long-term operation of MCPs in real production have to be met. One of requirements is to develop a monitoring system that can detect and diagnose faults such as catalyst deterioration. Such a system is usually based on the measurements available from installed sensors. However, the existing miniaturized sensors are too expensive, and the installation of such sensors sometimes disturbs the flow. Therefore, it is important to develop a monitoring system that can estimate the unmeasured states and unknown parameters from the indirect measurements. In this work, a physical model-based monitoring system for tubular microreactors is developed. Particle filter is used in the developed system and is compared with other nonlinear filters in the estimation performance.