A thermodynamic approach to the passive boundary control of tubular reactors

This paper proposes a thermodynamics based approach for the boundary control of distributed single phase reactive systems in one spatial dimension. More precisely, this approach is motivated by the so-called thermodynamic availability directly derived from the concavity of the entropy function for homogeneous mixtures. On this basis, a general connection to the boundary control is developed for the case of tubular reactors by selecting an appropriate inputoutput pair. In this control framework, we shall show that to be (strictly) passive, a necessary and sufficient condition for the dissipation that is strongly related to the transport phenomena and chemical reaction has to be fulfilled. Consequently, a proportional boundary feedback control law globally stabilizes the reactor at a desired stationary profile. For a simple study without convection, the dissipation condition holds thanks to the irreversible entropy production.