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This paper deals with the observer design of nonlinear tubular chemical reactor models. The analysis is performed on a linearized version of the model around a steady-state profile, in which some coefficients are a function of the spatial variable. The study starts from a general model of chemical tubular reactors that will serve as a benchmark model for the formulation in the infinite dimensional Hilbert state space. The optimal output injection operator associated to the proposed observer is computed via the solution of the infinite-dimensional Riccati equation in the space variable. The performance of the observer is illustrated through numerical experiments of an industrial pulp bleaching tubular reactor model.

This paper is concerned with the observer design for one-dimensional class of nonisothermal tubular reactors considering in-domain pointwise measurements of temperature over the entire spatial domain. A Lyapunov-based design method is derived for the PDE system providing sufficient conditions, in the form of standard linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), for the exponential convergence of the estimation error with a given decay rate. The approach is applied and tested with a representative case of a tubular reactor with non-monotonic kinetics satisfying the sufficient solvability conditions. Simulation results support the effectiveness of the suggested design.