ABSTRACT
In establishing the optimal control of chemical reactors, the control variable used most frequently is the temperature of the reacting mixture. As such, temperature is not a practical control variable. The temperature of the reactor can be changed by withdrawing heat, or adding heat by means of flowing coolant or heating fluid around the reactor. This chapter discusses optimal control of oil shale pyrolysis and considers the problem of determining the optimal flow rates of coolant and heating fluid. Iterative dynamic programming (IDP) is well suited for solving complex optimal control problems, such as the ones encountered by chemical engineers. The main advantage lies in its robustness in obtaining the global optimum. Although the possibility of getting a local optimum exists, changing the parameters in IDP such as initial region size, number of grid points and the number of randomly chosen points per iteration usually allows one to obtain the global optimum.
