A Bayesian approach to feed reconstruction

Abstract

In this thesis, we developed a Bayesian approach to estimate the detailed composition of an unknown feedstock in a chemical plant by combining information from a few bulk measurements of the feedstock in the plant along with some detailed composition information of a similar feedstock that was measured in a laboratory. The complexity of the Bayesian model combined with the simplex-type constraints on the weight fractions makes it difficult to sample from the resulting high-dimensional posterior distribution. We reviewed and implemented different algorithms to generate samples from this posterior that satisfy the given constraints. We tested our approach on a data set from a plant.