State profile estimation in a biomass gasification tubular reactor

Abstract

The problem of estimating gas and solid concentration, as well as temperature and flow spatial profiles evolutions of a bistable tubular biomass gasification reactor from temperature measurements is addressed. The problem is addressed with a staged model-based geometric nonlinear estimation approach with robust convergence criterion and systematic tuning over the set of admissible estimation structures. By structure it is meant the number of model stages, the number of sensors, and their locations. The approach is illustrated with a representative start-up example studied before with experiments and simulation, finding that: the state profile evolutions can be estimated with a 6-stage model and two temperature measurements at sensitive locations before and after the hotspot.