Control of a Chemical Reactor with Chaotic Dynamics

In this paper, control of a non-isothermal continuous stirred tank reactor in which two parallel autocatalytic reactions take place has been addressed. The reactor shows chaotic behavior for a certain set of reactor parameters. In order to control the product concentration, an optimal state feedback controller has been designed. Since concentrations of reactor species are not measured, an observer has been designed for implementation of the proposed control scheme. The local asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system including observer dynamics has been shown via the Lyapunov stability theorem. Effectiveness of the proposed controller in load rejection and set point tracking has been illustrated through simulation.