Continuous stirred tank reactors: easy to stabilise?

The objective of this work is to make use of methodologies and tools from Lyapunov theory in the design of bounded control laws for the temperature stabilisation of a class of continuous stirred tank reactors with exothermic or endothermic reactions. Simple output feedback control laws, i.e. control laws that feed back only the available measurements, are designed. It is shown that these controllers yield global asymptotic stability and do not require precise knowledge of the system parameters. The capabilities of the proposed method to handle control input constraints and model uncertainties are also discussed. The work is completed with the analysis of a case study: the van der Vusse reaction mechanism. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.