Quality control is essential in engineering and manufacturing operations. It ensures that the plant is being utilized efficiently and that the products delivered are of the highest quality. Quality control, in terms of paint production, generally involves sampling, where the paint produced in the reactor is sampled regularly to ensure that it meets a set of target criteria. These target criteria include desired yield and concentration levels, as determined by a reaction kinetics model. Occasionally, errors between the expected and actual product requirements arise due to an inaccurate prediction of the rate constant for one of the reactants. Maple, Maplesoft’s powerful computation tool, can be used to validate production concentration by assessing the quality of paint produced in a chemical process.
In this example, Maple is used to derive and solve the system of six non-linear differential algebraic equations that define the reaction. The experimental data sets are imported and the concentrations of the compounds over time are plotted to determine the concentration at steady state. A comparative analysis between the predicted concentrations and test data using Maple’s Statistics package is performed. In the example, a discrepancy between the theoretical results and the experimental data is noted and traced back to an inaccurate reaction-rate constant for one of the reactants. Then a more accurate value for the rate constant is found using Maple's Optimization package.
With the corrected rate constant, the model now accurately predicts the actual concentration of the product. Unlike traditional solution methods that require writing hundreds of lines of code, the resulting Maple document is quickly created using intuitive notation, saving days in production analysis. Since the document is an executable, modifiable description of the problem and its solution, the document can easily be reused to create prototypes and optimize other reaction schemes.
Contact Maplesoft to learn how Maple can be used in your projects.
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