Advanced Warning And Runaway Disposal

The focus of this project is to improve quality, safety and reliability in chemical plants by developing and verifying a new device for early detection of runaway initiation, based on the application of chaos theory techniques. We therefore intend to improve, validate and verify in chemical industries -end users- such a device.

The project has been divided in:
1) Theoretical improvements aiming at reducing the number of temperature measurements inside the reactor and to extend the range of validity of the runaway criterion;
2) Modifications to the already existing prototype;
3) Verification in bench-scale reactors with reactions of industrial interest;
4) Verification in industrial sites under normal operating conditions and final validation using industrial processes by experimentally simulating plant malfunctions.