Adaptive unit-vector control of an uncertain heat diffusion process

This paper deals with the distributed tracking control of a heat process having uncertain diffusivity and subject to a distributed disturbance whose L2 norm is bounded by a constant which is not known a priori. Under certain regularity assumptions on the disturbance and on the chosen reference profile, a distributed unit-vector control, with an adaptive magnitude, is designed which provides the asymptotic tracking of the reference. The logic governing the gain adaptation is gradient-based and monodirectional, i.e. the gain cannot decrease over time. Lyapunov arguments are invoked to support the convergence properties of the proposed scheme, whose performance are also investigated by means of computer simulations.