Pointwise innovation-based state observation of exothermic tubular reactors

The problem of estimating the spatio-temporal temperature concentration distribution in a tubular reactor with first order exothermic reaction and in-domain pointwise temperature measurement is considered. The problem is addressed using a simple point innovation structure, which imposes the measurement information at the sensor location in the simulator. Rigorous convergence conditions are presented in dependence of the sensor location and reactor parameters in terms of the dominant eigenvalues of the modified linear transport operators mid the Lipschitz constant of the reaction rate. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed approach yields good performance even in the presence of unknown feed temperature perturbations. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.