Averaging Level Control to Reduce Off-Spec Material in a Continuous Pharmaceutical Pilot Plant
The judicious use of buffering capacity is important in the development of future continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. The potential benefits are investigated of using optimal-averaging level control for tanks that have buffering capacity for a section of a continuous pharmaceutical pi...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
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Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113335 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4304-3484 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2895-9443 |
| Summary: | The judicious use of buffering capacity is important in the development of future continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. The potential benefits are investigated of using optimal-averaging level control for tanks that have buffering capacity for a section of a continuous pharmaceutical pilot plant involving two crystallizers, a combined filtration and washing stage and a buffer tank. A closed-loop dynamic model is utilized to represent the experimental operation, with the relevant model parameters and initial conditions estimated from experimental data that contained a significant disturbance and a change in setpoint of a concentration control loop. The performance of conventional proportional-integral (PI) level controllers is compared with optimal-averaging level controllers. The aim is to reduce the production of off-spec material in a tubular reactor by minimizing the variations in the outlet flow rate of its upstream buffer tank. The results show a distinct difference in behavior, with the optimal-averaging level controllers strongly outperforming the PI controllers. In general, the results stress the importance of dynamic process modeling for the design of future continuous pharmaceutical processes. Keywords: control; process modeling; process simulation; parameter estimation; dynamic modeling; optimization; crystallization; continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing |
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