Analysis of the runaway in an industrial heterocatalytic reactor

This work focuses on runaway behaviour of industrial catalytic tube-reactor and presents how decision trees can be used for forecasting the runaway. The steady-state simulator of the reactor and runaway criterion based on Ljapunov’s indirect stability analysis have been used to generate the database used by the decision tree induction algorithm. The extracted logical rules can be used in an operator support system (OSS), and are useful for working out safe operating strategies.