In this paper, the design and control of an improved process for the manufacture of a fuel additive (glycerol tertiary butyl ethers, GTBE) from glycerol and isobutylene is developed. The improved process redirects one recycle stream, uses a stripping column instead of a flash tank to recover isobutylene, and uses a rectifying column instead of a distillation column to purify the product. Economic analysis shows that the improved process has a 22% lower total annual cost (TAC) than the best known process published in the literature. Significant increases in the selectivity of the overall process from 84.7% to 99.3% can also be realized by comparing the optimized improved design versus the original design. Dynamic simulations were also conducted and indicated that stringent product specification can be met with a simple decentralized feedback control structure despite impurities in the feed streams and also changes in the throughput.

An image database of printed fabrics with repeating dot patterns was created to alleviate issues associated with management of and searches for numerous dot printed fabrics in the printing industry. The function of the database is to archive and allow retrieval of images. First, we discuss image archiving of repeating pattern-based dot printed fabrics. The color image was scanned by resolution of 200 dpi. The wavelet transformation was used to preprocess the image to obtain a scanned image 1/16 of the size of the original to be the stored image. To acquire images with repeating pattern color and repeating pattern template, the binary image of each pattern was obtained using the Sobel edge detection method and a morphological operation. Then pattern elements identical to the target pattern element were screened out. Afterwards, the centroid positions of these identical pattern elements were used to subdivide the repeating pattern color image and repeating pattern template image using a vertical vector method. Finally, the RGB 512-color histogram was used as the color feature of the dot printed fabrics, and the geometric and moment invariant feature values of the repeating pattern template image were used as the pattern feature of the dot printed fabrics. Our experimental results show that images can be acquired that are suitable for use in a dot printed fabric image database. The color and template images of the repeating patterns, which represent the image content of the printed fabrics, were obtained to create an image database of repeating pattern-based dot printed fabrics. This image database contains data on 300 printed fabrics which can be used for subsequent research on database image retrieval.