An Exothermic Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor Is Feedback Equivalent to a Linear System

This brief paper demonstrates the concept of linear feedback equivalence for an exothermic eontinu-ous stirred tank reactor with first order kinetics. Feedback control is achieved by finding a transformation for the nonlinear system which carries this system into a linear controllable system in Brunovsky canonical form. A linear state feedback controller is then designed which achieves control over a broad range of operating conditions. This example demonstrates how recent developments in nonlinear control theory can be applied to chemical systems without relying on the usual methods of local linearization.