State observers for tubular reactors with unknown kinetics

In this paper, the extension to tubular reactors of asymptotic observers originally developed for STR is ®rst discussed and illus- trated with real-life data on an non-isothermal ®xed bed reactor. Then it will be shown how to design exponential observers, which are also independent of the process kinetics but for which the rate of convergence may be arbitrarily ®xed (unlike the asymptotic observers for which the rate of convergence depends on the operating conditions).