Einladung zum Vortrag im Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik

  Data-Driven Optimization of Batch Processes:
The Design of Dynamic Experiments

Christos Georgakis
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
and Systems Research Institute
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts, USA

Tuesday, 26. April 2011, 4:00 p.m.
IST-Seminar-Room 3.243 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

Many batch processes cannot be optimized using knowledge-driven process models, because such models do not exist. This is due to our incomplete understanding of the inner workings of many batch processes and unfavorable economics due to their small production rates. To resolve this impasse, a new data-driven methodology is presented for optimizing the operation of a variety of batch processes when at least one time-varying operating condition needs to be selected. This methodology calculates optimal time-varying conditions without the use of an a priori knowledge-driven model. The approach generalizes the classical Design of Experiments (DoE) methodology, limited by its consideration of time-invariant decision variables. The new approach, called the Design of Dynamic Experiments (DoDE), designs experiments that explore a set of “dynamic signatures” of the unknown decision function(s). Constrained optimization of the interpolating response surface model, calculated from the results of the performed experiments, leads to the selection of the optimal operating conditions. Results from two simulated examples and an experimental pharmaceutical process demonstrate the powerful utility of the method. The first examines a simple reversible reaction in a batch reactor, where the time-dependant reactor temperature is the decision function. The second example examines the optimization of a penicillin fermentation process, where the feeding profile of the substrate is the decision variable. In both cases, a finite number of experiments leads to the effective approximation of the optimal operation of the process. The third example examines an asymmetric catalytic hydrogenation reaction in the production of an active pharmaceutical ingredient. Here the best of the DoDE experiments is 50% better than the best experiment of the DoE set.

Biographical Information

Dr. Christos Georgakis is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Tufts University and the Bernard M. Gordon Senior Faculty Fellow in Systems Engineering. He received his Chemical Engineering Diploma in 1970 from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece; his M.S. in 1972 from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Minnesota, both in Chemical Engineering. Starting in 1975, he served as du Pont Assistant Professor and Edgerton Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and as Professor of Measurement and Control at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece. He joined Lehigh University in 1983 where he founded and directed for almost 20 years the Chemical Process Modeling and Control Research Center and its associated industrial consortium. Lehigh University honored him in 2001 with the Iacocca Professorship in Engineering. Between 2002 and 2004 he was the Othmer Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnic University, in New York City and joint Tufts in 2004. In the middle 1990s, Professor Georgakis also served for three years as a Visiting Professor at Delft University in the Netherlands.
He was awarded in 1978 a Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Grant. In 1998 one of his publications was selected for the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award of the American Automatic Control Council. In 2001 he was the recipient of the Computing Award of the CAST Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He became a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineer in 1998, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004 and a fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) in 2007. He has served as the Chair of the Technical Committee on Process Control and as the Chair of the Coordinating Committee on Industrial Applications of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). In 2002-03 he served as the President of the American Automatic Control Council.