Wiener Model and Extremum Seeking Control for a CO Preferential Oxidation Reactor with the CuO-CeO2 catalyst

Hydrogen rich gas produced by hydrocarbon reforming contains CO up to several thousand ppm which acts as a poison for the proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Preferential oxidation (PROX) is one of the promising methods that reduce its concentration below 10ppm. The PROX reactor with the CuO-CeO2 catalyst shows optimal reactor temperature and a control system that maintains the PROX reactor temperature at its optimal one under changing environments and catalyst deactivations. Experimental studies to obtain a dynamic model for the CO PROX reactor have been done and the Wiener-type nonlinear model is obtained. Then the extremum seeking control that can track the optimal temperature for the Wiener-type nonlinear system is applied and its performance is verified experimentally. The extremum seeking control is a non-parametric real-time optimization method and can be applied effectively to other CO PROX reactors with different operating conditions.