A BENCH-SCALE EVAPORATIVE CALORIMETER FOR DIAGNOSTIC AND CONTROL POSSIBILITIES IN VACUUM PROCESSES

For various chemical processes, heat and mass evaporative flows are generated through vacuum control in order to ensure isothermal operations or flexible tracking of temperature trajectories. To study such processes, a 5-liter bench-scale evaporative calorimeter is presented in this paper. As an example, the application of this microcomputer-controlled calorimeter to the on-line identification of the differential heat evolution during batch evaporative crystallizations is reported. It is shown that satisfactory estimated results are obtained by means of a recursive least-squares policy. These results could allow an extension of diagnostic and control possibilities for many common processes which operate in vacuum conditions.