Optimal control of the Sabatier process in microchannel reactors

Abstract We consider the optimization of a chemical microchannel reactor by means of PDE-constrained optimization techniques, using the example of the Sabatier reaction. To model the chemically reacting flow in the microchannels, we introduce a three- and a one-dimensional model. As these are given by strongly coupled and highly nonlinear systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), we present our software package cashocs which implements the adjoint approach and facilitates the numerical solution of the subsequent optimization problems. We solve a parameter identification problem numeric... Mehr ...