A thermodynamic approach to the passive boundary control of tubular reactors

This paper proposes a thermodynamics based approach for the boundary control of distributed single phase reactive systems in one spatial dimension. More precisely, this approach is motivated by the so-called thermodynamic availability directly derived from the concavity of the entropy function for homogeneous mixtures. On this basis, a general connection to the boundary control is developed for the case of tubular reactors by selecting an appropriate input- output pair. In this control framework, we shall show that to be (strictly) passive, a necessary and sufficient condition for the dissipation that is strongly related to the transport phenomena and chemical reaction has to be fulfilled. Consequently, a proportional boundary feedback control law globally stabilizes the reactor at a desired stationary profile. For a simple study without convection, the dissipation condition holds thanks to the irreversible entropy production.