LabVIEW Simulates the Operation of a Chemical Reactor
In recent years, chemical reactors have found many applications in chemical and industrial process fields. High-value products are made by transforming raw materials through a variety of industrial processes such as mixing products, chemical reactions, distillation and crystallization. Chemical reactors are often used in large process industries such as fermentation of beverage products in brewery companies, medical production in pharmaceutical units, petrochemical complexes, chemical industry, wastewater treatment plants, etc. Batch reactors are also useful for laboratory production of small quantities of reactions and experiments involving reaction kinetics, volatiles, and thermodynamics.
Batch reactors are often expensive to operate. Each reactor has different product production, timing, price and reliability. During operation, the behavior of the reactor may exhibit nonlinear effects such as multiple stability or sustained oscillations, heat transfer and abnormal thermodynamics, and many safety concerns. This makes reactors one of the most challenging industrial units to control and thermal runaway, showing that safety must also be considered when designing, building and testing these reactors.
In order to test new concepts of reactors in terms of control strategies, chemical reactions, stability and safety issues, virtual reactor computer simulation studies are better than testing with real reactors in the field. Preliminary computer-based simulation tests will help select reactor parameters, rather than conducting time-consuming and expensive field experiments.
Batch reactors are used in large industries to process toxic or highly potent compounds. Chemicals enter the reactor through several inlet valves. Agitators/stirrers are used to mix incoming chemicals. Reactor tanks are heated or cooled by coils/jackets. The final product is made after a certain amount of time and chemical reactions in the reactor. There are two outlet arrangements, one at the bottom to connect to the final product storage tank and one at the top to release excess gases and vapours. These reactors range in capacity from less than 1 liter to over 15,000 liters. Reactors are usually made of steel, stainless steel, glass-lined steel, glass or special alloys.
In the project, a reactor with input valves was designed to feed four chemical solutions. A stirrer was used to mix these solutions in the reactor tank. Heating coils are attached to the water tank to raise the temperature to 250 degrees Celsius. After mixing and heating the product, an outlet valve is set to store the final product in a storage tank.
LabVIEW is used to realize the control and monitoring work of chemical batch reaction reactor. The entire simulated reactor project is divided into two main parts: the front panel and the block diagram. The logic and code for simulating the reactor is written in the block diagram.
The Batch Reactor Simulator is designed for process engineers, chemists and technicians who need a safe, reliable and robust tool to minimize production costs, deal with safety regulations and save production time. Simulation of chemical reactor operation helps detect unexpected phenomena or system behavior, safety issues, and aids in the development of control strategies for operating the reactor. Thus, in large industries, computer-aided reactor simulators serve as powerful tools to optimize operating modes, set initial points and provide working simulations for different operating modes offline.
This is an application of LabVIEW. For more development cases, please log on to the official website of Beijing Hanwen Wangxing for more information. If you need LabVIEW project cooperation development, please contact us.