Observer Design for Chemical Tubular Reactors Based on System Linearization

This paper presents an observer design technique for a class or nonlinear coupled parabolic PDEs using the infinite dimensional approach in Hilbert spaces. In particular, the linear approximate model incorporating the spatially varying coefficients of the set of PDEs is used for designing a Luenberger-like observer in order to achieve exponential convergence of the estimation error dynamics. The proposed observer is applied to a chemical tubular reactor considering only boundary measurements. The observer performance is assessed via numerical simulations.