摘要:AbstractThis paper deals with the optimal operation of a continuously operated laboratory membrane separation plant. The goal is to find an economically optimal regime of operation using the transmembrane pressure (TMP) and the operating temperature as adjustable set-points for the low-level controllers. The main challenge is to identify the optimum in the absence of an accurate process model. We employ an iterative real-time optimization scheme, modifier adaptation with quadratic approximation (MAWQA), to identify the plant optimum in the presence of the plant-model mismatch and measurement noise. Two experiments are performed; one with and one without a productivity constraint. The experimental results show the capabilities of the MAWQA scheme to identify the process optimum in real-world scenarios. The optimum identified by the MAWQA scheme coincides with the optimum of a surrogate model that was built using a larger data set.