Adaptive extremum seeking control of a tubular reactor with limited actuation

In this paper, we optimize the productivity of a chemical reaction taking place in a tubular reactor governed by a set of hyperbolic partial differential equations with unknown kinetics. We use only the temperature information along the reactor to estimate the unmeasured concentration at the reactor exit. Using adaptive extremum seeking, we derive a feedback algorithm that steers the system to its optimum using a non-distributed jacket temperature actuation.