An investigation in food process simulation using data reconciliation

• Published in: Computers & chemical engineering 1993, Vol.17, p.S257-S262
• Main Authors: Meyer, M., Pingaud, H., Enjalbert, M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Computer simulation; Data processing; Food industries; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; Methods of analysis, processing and quality control, regulation, standards; Numerical methods
• ISSN: 0098-1354; 1873-4375
• DOI: 10.1016/0098-1354(93)80239-J

This paper deals with the application of a data reconciliation method to an industrial food plant. A distillation process performs high standard level alcohol purification downstream a fermentation unit of beet molasses. The ability to take samples as well as the difficulty of their analytical analysis have limited the available off-line information on chemical composition of the process streams. Furthermore, each process stream has not been instrumented by a flowmeter. In the first part of this article, we will show how it is possible to partition the set of flowrates and mass compositions of the process streams in terms of observability and redundancy of the process mass balances. It will lead to an adapted formulation of the optimisation problem. In the second part, the numerical difficulty due to the presence of very low mass fraction components, whose characterization is essential to validate the quality specification, is discussed. Emphasis is laid on the numerical methods selected to solve a problem with hundreds of variables. Finally, the “a posteriori” statistical tests on the adjusted measures are discussed. It constitutes an essential step to judge the pertinence of the results and to point out the gross measurement errors.