THE EFFECT OF DISCRETIZATION ON THE PI CONTROL OF A TUBULAR REACTOR MODEL WITH AXIAL DIFFUSION

Abstract

Various nonlinear behaviors, including chaos, may result from a tubular reactor with an exothermic reaction when a PI controller is added. In this paper, we show that for this highly nonlinear system the stable gains are very sensitive to the number of states used for controller design. The region of successful control is determined as a function of kp , kJ, and the number of spatial discretizations.