Temperature oscillation calorimetry by means of a Kalman-like observer: the joint estimation of Qr and UA in a stirred tank polymerization reactor

The present work is concerned with the joint estimation of the rate of heat produced by the emulsion terpolymerization of styrene, butyl acrylate and methyl methacrylate (Q_r), and the overall heat transfer coefficient (UA) from temperature measurements and reactor heat balance. By making specific assumptions on the dynamics of the parameters UA and Q_r, we designed a Kalman-like observer to carry out the estimation of these two time-varying parameters, without the need for neither additional measurements nor on-line samples. Temperature oscillations are induced in the cooling jacket in order to ensure the observability of the system. One further aspect of our approach is that it only requires the reactor energy balance to perform the estimation.