Control of continuous-stirred tank reactors: Stabilization with unknown reaction rates

In this work we study the stabilization of continuous stirred tank reactors with unknown reaction rates. We prove that, under certain general assumptions, the chemical reactor can be stabilized with high-gain feedback. Simulations show that high-gain feedback may lead to hard input saturation and poor closed-loop performance. A reaction rate uncertainty estimator is introduced which, when coupled with a nonlinear feedback, leads to global stability with acceptable control performance. We conclude that state observation is unnecessary for the stabilization of the class of chemical reactor considered here. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd