Status
My Ph.D. studies started in November 1993. I am funded by the PROSIT program, and my advisor is Prof. Kristian Lien. I plan to finish my doctoral work within the end of 1996.
Research area
The scope of my thesis is design of chemical reactor systems. This year I have in particular studied reactor systems used for the production of low density polyethylene (LDPE). This project is done in cooperation with Borealis AS. The relation of product quality to design and operation of the reactor is not fully understood, hence there is a commercial incentive to develop methods to understand this better. A comprehensive literature study on production and modeling of LDPE reactors has been carried out. So far, preliminary reactor models, with quite detailed thermodynamics, has been implemented been for carrying out simple simulations.
This spring , in connection with the PhD course in advanced process synthesis, a group work on optimization of the plant at Kaarstoe was carried out together with two other PhD students. This project turned out to be very involved. Although we fell short of time to draw any major conclusions, a very thorough understanding of the optimization of separation systems was achieved. At the end of the year, I've spent time trying to find a good design and optimization formulation for the LDPE reactor system. A new promising approach which applies to reacting systems in general has been derived. I'm currently working on the implementation of this approach in GAMS and in Matlab. The GAMS implementation is based on the superstructure model developed last yar, while the Matlab implementation is based on the Matlab implementation of the attainable region approach .
Attended courses
Activities
Plans for 1996
This spring I will finish my last course, Philosophy and the theory of science. I intend to spend some time at a university abroad this summer, preferably Carnegie-Mellon. A paper on the novel approach for design of reactor systems is also planned for the AIChE conference this fall. Finally, I plan to finish my doctoral work at the end of the year.