Modeling of an unseeded reactive crystallization process using multiobjective optimization

Modeling of reactive crystallization processes is considered to be a complex task where the reaction and crystallization processes occuring together presents additional challenges. A simplified approach is shown in this work to model such reactive crystallization processes using limited number of experiments covering the design space. In the current application, a case study is demonstrated using unseeded semi-batch reactive crystallization of salicylic acid. Multiobjective optimization (MOO) approach is used to determine the kinetic model parameters considering surrogate objectives related to solution concentration and mean size of crystals using the experimental data collected. The proposed first principles model is in good agreement with the experimental data and thus can be further applied for model predictions to determine optimal control strategies.