Geometric-dissipative control of exothermic continuous reactors

The problem of robustly stabilizing through output-feedback control an open-loop unstable exothermic continuous reactor with temperature measurement is addressed. The combination of advanced geometric control and classical mechanics methods yields: (i) solvability of the detailed model-based nonlinear output-feedback problem in terms of passivity, observability and dissipativity, (ii) open-loop energy and closed-loop Lyapunov functions in analytic form, and (iii) the tradeoff between response speed, robustness, and control effort. On the basis of simplified model tailored according to the passivity-observability-dissipativity structure, the advanced geometric observer-based nonlinear controller is realized with an industrial-like PID controller. The methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations.