Concentration control in a tubular reactor by late lumping approach

Tubular chemical reactors are often modelled by using parabolic partial differential equations (PDE). Usually control strategies based on these equations make use of lumping and approximation of the model prior to controller design. This paper presents an approach to design a control strategy directly based on PDE for concentration control via the inlet boundary condition. The strategy uses a two-level controller. The inner loop is a Lyapunov-based adaptive controller that also estimates on-line the process kinetic parameters. The outer loop combines feedforward and feedback actions to track the set point. The performance of the controller is illustrated by numerical simulation of a bleaching tower example.