Model-based Control

This chapter is focused on the temperature control of chemical batch reactors. First, a general overview on control of chemical processes is provided. Then, a model-based control scheme, based on a combination of an adaptive nonlinear observer and an adaptive cascade control, is presented, and its stability properties are rigorously analyzed. Also, model-free variants of the controller–observer scheme are discussed. Finally, a case study, based on the phenol–formaldehyde reaction introduced in the Chap. 2, is developed in order to test the adaptive model-based approach and compare its performance with those obtained by adopting model-free approaches and classical linear PID controllers.