Category: Science

Summary: Asking whether intermediate purge control in a poisoned continuous stirred-tank reactor restores productivity better than either weak or aggressive intervention.

Catalytic reactors can lose activity when poison accumulates, yet purging too often can also reduce productive operating time. This experiment asks whether there is a re-entrant purge threshold where adaptive intervention best balances productivity recovery against the cost of repeated purge events.

The script runs stochastic reactor trials, measures poison level, purge fraction, activity, productivity, and pulse rate, and identifies the threshold giving the largest re-entrant gain. By comparing across thresholds rather than only comparing purge versus no purge, it looks for a genuine interior optimum.

That is useful for process control because poisoning is often intermittent and control actions are disruptive. The result can show when purge timing is acting as a rescue mechanism and when it simply interrupts the reactor too often.

Method: Continuous stirred-tank reactor simulations with poisoning and adaptive purge thresholds, aggregated across repeated runs to locate re-entrant performance gains.

What is measured: Re-entrant gain, productivity, poison level, purge fraction, activity, pulse rate, support fraction, and best purge threshold.