Optimal Periodic Control of a Continuous Polymerization Reactor

Optimal periodic control theory was applied to a polymerization reactor, in order to find the periodic feed flows that allow the production of polymers with prespecified values of the number average chain length and of the polydispersity. The system consists of a `living´ anionic homopolymerization carried out in a continuous stirred-tank reactor (CSTR). The problem was solved adopting a suboptimal objective function and a novel iterative numerical procedure.