A real time simulation model of production system of Glycerol Esterification with self optimization

This paper presents a new approach of a Real Time Simulation (RTS) to model the Glycerol Esterification (GE) production system with Self Optimization(SO). The quality and capacity of production GE are the factors that need to monitor and control. In this model, we deployed BPMN to analyze and design the requirement and used data acquisition system with real time sensor. Real-time data acquisition by optical sensors acquired several quality parameters such as viscosity, pH, purity and density which was interfaced to a SQL database. The model of self-optimization for quality surveillance was based on previous Wagels (2012) work. The experiments showed that the evaluation of the system performance was operatable to optimize a range of parameter esterification with Oleic Acid in producing Glycerol Mono Oleate (GMO) such as temperature between at range of 240-260 °C, baffle rotation speed between at range 300-400 RPM and volume at range 25-30 L for each batch. The previous works only set in a fixed value at 250 °C, 350 RPM and 24L. In future work, it is recommended to accelerate the whole process including to re-structure the real time data acquisition system.