The concept of variant and invariant states has been developed to decouple the various dynamic effects in reaction systems. The aim of the project is to explore the applications of this concept to control of reaction systems. The concept of reaction variants has been exploited to estimate the reaction rates directly from measurements without the use of a kinetic model by Rodrigues, Billeter et al. (2015), for the temperature control in a continuous stirred-tank reactor.

A finer separation of the various dynamic effects in both homogeneous and heterogeneous open reaction systems has been proposed by Amrhein at al. (2010) and Bhatt et al. (2010) and reformulated recently as a linear transformation of the number of moles to vessel extents by Rodrigues, Srinivasan et al. (2015). This approach was used to implement a cascade control scheme for the temperature control in a CSTR.

The project focuses on validating and building on the work done in this topic.

The main objectives of this project are,
- to compare and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of two different approaches for temperature control in open reactors, via rate estimation and feedback linearization or via cascade control using the concept of extents
- to extend the control via rate estimation and feedback linearization to control of reactant concentrations in open reactors
- to extend the control via rate estimation and feedback linearization to control in the presence of dynamics in the actuator.