Lyapunov based nonlinear control of tubular chemical reactors

This paper is concerned with the stabilization of tubular reactors in which convection, dispersion, conduction phenomena as well as chemical reaction take place. The stabilization is performed by using a Lyapunov function derived from the second law of thermodynamics called availability function. This function is used to design a stabilizing distributed control law around a stationary profile of a tubular reactor driven far from the thermodynamic equilibrium. A numerical example illustrates the proposed control strategy. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.