Control of an exothermic packed-bed tubular reactor

The problem of robustly controlling a highly exothermic gas-phase packed-bed tubular reactor on the basis of feed and reactor temperature measurements is addressed. First, advanced nonlinear control yields a detailed model-based output feedback (OF) control design with passivity and observability solvability conditions, sensor location criterion, and simple tuning. Then, the behavior of the advanced controller is recovered with a simplified model-based realization that amounts to an industrial temperature tracking controller with feedforward (FF) dynamic setpoint compensation. The advanced and industrial controllers are formally connected. The approach is illustrated and tested with a representative case example through numerical simulations.