Copyright © 2011 M. P. Di Ciccio et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We project a novel digital control law for continuous stirred tank reactors, based on sampled measures of temperatures and reactant concentration, as it happens in practice. The methodology of relative degree preservation under sampling is used. It is proved that a suitably approximated sampled system, obtained by Taylor series expansion and truncation, in closed loop with the projected control law, is asymptotically stable, provided that a condition on the sampling period is verified. Such condition allows for values of the sampling period larger than necessary in practical implementation with usual technology. Many simulations show the high performance of the proposed digital control law.