Terminal sliding mode control for continuous stirred tank reactor

• A finite time stability observer is designed for CSTR to estimate the system states.
• Integral terminal sliding mode controller is designed to achieve good control performance for CSTR.
• The stability of the observer and the controller are proved by using Lyapunov method.
• The simulation is used to test the control algorithm.

A continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is a typical example of chemical industrial equipment, whose dynamics represent an extensive class of second order nonlinear systems. It has been witnessed that designing a good control algorithm for the CSTR is very challenging due to the high complexity. The two difficult issues in CSTR control are state estimation and external disturbance attenuation. In general, in industrial process control a fast and robust response is essential. Driven by these challenging issues and desired performance, this paper proposes an output feedback terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) framework which is developed for CSTR, and can estimate the system states and stabilize the system output tracking error to zero in a finite time. The corresponding stability analysis is presented in terms of the Lyapunov method. Illustrative examples are demonstrated by using Matlab simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.