A Model-Free Extremum Seeking Controller with Application to Tracking a Nonlinear Chemical Reaction

Abstract: In this paper, we develop the extremum-seeking approach to generate admissible trajectories in a neighborhood of a given reference curve in the state space. The cost function of the problem represents the distance between the current system state and the reference curve, which is parameterized as a function of time. Such reference curves naturally arise as optimal trajectories in isoperimetric optimization problems for nonlinear chemical reactions, where the objective is to maximize the average reaction product over a given period. We apply the proposed extremum seeking control design to a nonisothermal reaction model and illustrate the resulting tracking errors through numerical simulations.