Optimal operation of an industrial alkylation reactor

The optimal operation of an industrial alkylation unit is studied here. The main goal of such process is to evaluate the optimal control variables (mainly, olefin feed rate, alkylate yield, motor octane number, acid addition rate, acid strength, performance number and isobutane/olefin (I/O) ratio) under restriction on process production. A variety of feeds choices can be provided, thus to find the global minimum, the optimization problem formulation requires an effective technique. The optimization process is aimed to maximize the economic profit of the process while keeping a number of equality and inequality restrictions into account. A Non-Linear Programming problem has employed for optimizing the control variables based on a Successive Quadratic Programming (SQP) technique within gPROMS software. New results with respect to the industrial alkylation process (highest profit and lowest CPU (Central Processing Unit) time) have found compared to prior works.