Asymptotic Observers for Fixed Bed Reactors

This paper deals with the on-line estimation of reactant and product concentrations in fixed bed reactors. It is shown how to extend to tubular reactors the asymptotic observer developed for stirred tank reactors. The proposed observer can be viewed as an alternative to classical observers (extended Kalman filter and extended Luenberger observer). Two of its main features are that it is independent of the knowledge of the kinetics and that its implementation does not require the fulfillment of any observability conditions. In order to advance the application of this method, the stability and convergence properties of the proposed method is discussed.