A Model-Based Control Scheme for Chemical Batch Reactors

In this paper, a model-based temperature control scheme for batch chemical reactors is proposed. A controller-observer scheme is designed, where a nonlinear observer is adopted to estimate the heat released by the reaction. The controller is based on the closure of two feedback loops, thus ensuring robustness of the overall scheme, while preserving the simplicity of the control laws. Remarkably, the observer and the controller can be designed and tuned separately. In the case of a poorly known heat-transfer coefficient, both the observer and the controller incorporate a direct adaptive estimation strategy of the coefficient. The performance, in terms of accuracy and robustness, are investigated via computer simulations