Unveiling Optimal Operating Conditions for an Epoxy Polymerization Process Using Multi-objective Evolutionary Computation

The optimization of the epoxy polymerization process involves a number of conflicting objectives and more than twenty decision parameters. In this paper, the problem is treated truly as a multi-objective optimization problem and near-Pareto-optimal solutions corresponding to two and three objectives are found using the elitist non-dominated sorting GA or NSGA-II. Objectives, such as the number average molecular weight, polydispersity index and reaction time, are considered. The first two objectives are related to the properties of a polymer, whereas the third objective is related to productivity of the polymerization process. The decision variables are discrete addition quantities of various reactants e.g. the amount of addition for bisphenolA (a monomer), sodium hydroxide and epichlorohydrin at different time steps, whereas the satisfaction of all species balance equations is treated as constraints. This study brings out a salient aspect of using an evolutionary approach to multi-o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Kalyanmoy Deb, Kishalay Mitra, Rinku Dewri, Saptarshi Majumdar
• Keywords: Epoxy Polymerization Process, GECCO 2004, Optimization Problems, Polymerization Process