Nonlinear Observer Design with Application to Chemical Reactors

Abstract

This study concerns the problem of nonlinear state observer design. It presents a nonlinear observer design approach, which allows to adjust the rate of the decay of observer error and is easy to use. Furthermore, in many chemical engineering cases, it is straightforward to prove that the observer-error dynamics is globally asymptotically stable. Two classes of chemical reactors (classical chemical reactors with parallel reactions and free-radical polymerization reactors) are considered to illustrate the application of the observer design approach. The global asymptotic stability of the observer-error dynamics is proved for the two classes of processes.