Abstract: The Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) is one of the most important and central pieces of equipment in many chemical and biochemical industries. It exhibits complex nonlinear characteristics, and efficient control of the product concentration in a CSTR can be achieved only through an accurate model. Sometimes, conventional feedback controllers may not perform well online due to variations in process dynamics resulting from nonlinear actuators, changes in environmental conditions, and variations in the character of the disturbances. This paper presents the mathematical model of the CSTR and the design of a Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) scheme using the MIT rule and the Lyapunov method for the adaptive mechanism. In addition, a comparative performance analysis of the two approaches for concentration control in a CSTR was conducted using MATLAB/Simulink. Finally, the simulation results showed that the MRAC using the MIT rule has better performance than the MRAC using the Lyapunov method.

Keywords: Adaptive control, MIT rule, Lyapunov, MATLAB, model reference, reactor, stirred tank, PID

Pages: 19-28

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