SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS FOR THE THERMAL STABILITY CRITERIA FOR HYDROGEN PEROXIDE

Chemical reactors carrying on exothermic processes may undergo to runaway reactions. To prevent from this hazard, Early Warning Detection Systems (EWDSs) can be used in industry, because they allow the on-line detection at an early stage of the runaway. The stability criterion of Hub and Jones is frequently implemented in EWDSs. Despite its simplicity during the detection step (the criterion is based just on measurements of the temperatures inside the reactor and jacket), the effectiveness in distinguishing between dangerous and non-dangerous occurrence is strongly affected by the presence of noise in the monitored signals. Furthermore, the numerical methodology for the calculation of the derivative of the measured signals may be of great importance for the definition of alarm conditions. In this paper, the sensitivity analysis of the performances of Hub and Jones criterion with respect to the Savitzky and Golay smoothing filter degree is discussed. The analysis is applied to experimental data on the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide 35%wt carried out in a Thermal Screening Unit. The sensitivity analysis of the performances of Hub and Jones criterion with respect to the Savitzky and Golay smoothing filter degree has been discussed. The analysis is applied to experimental data on the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide 35%wt carried out in a Thermal Screening Unit. The use of a pseudo adiabatic unit permits to analyze the performances of the thermal runaway criteria of an reacting system in conditions very close to a real runaway. The SG 21 points for either smoothing, as low-pass data filtering or for first or second derivative is a useful methodology. The obtained results can be easily applied to other higher-order methodology for the on-line control of divergent reactions.