NONLINEAR STATE-OBSERVER DESIGN WITH APPLICATION TO REACTORS

This article concerns the problem of nonlinear state-observer design. It presents a reduced-order nonlinear observer design approach, which allows adjustment of the rate of the decay of observer error and is ea sy to use. Furthermore, in many chemical engineering cases, it is stra ightforward to prove analytically that the observer-error dynamics are globally asymptotically stable. Several classes of reactors (classica l chemical reactors, free-radical polymerization reactors, and bio-rea ctors) are considered to illustrate the application of the observer de sign approach. The global asymptotic stability of the observer-error d ynamics is proved for each class of the processes. For many of these p rocesses, this study presents the first observer with an analytically proven global convergence. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd