Observer Design for Multivariable Transport-Reaction Systems Based on Spatially Distributed Measurements

This paper is concerned with the design of observers for a class of one-dimensional multi-state transport-reaction systems considering distributed in-domain measurements over the spatial domain. A design based on the Lyapunov method is proposed for the stabilization of the estimation error dynamics. The approach uses positive definite matrices to parameterize a class of Lyapunov functionals that are positive in the Lebesgue space of integrable square functions. Thus, the stability conditions can be expressed as a set of LMI constraints which can be solved numerically using sum of squares (SOS) and standard semi-definite programming (SDP) tools. In order to evaluate the proposed methodology, a state observer is designed to estimate the variables of a nonisothermal tubular reactor model. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the potentials of the proposed observer.