Boundary Control of Coupled Reaction-Advection-Diffusion Systems with Spatially-Varying Coefficients

Recently, the problem of boundary stabilization for unstable linear constant-coefficient coupled reaction-diffusion systems was solved by means of the backstepping method. The extension of this result to systems with advection terms and spatially-varying coefficients is challenging due to complex boundary conditions that appear in the equations verified by the control kernels. In this paper we address this issue by showing that these equations are essentially equivalent to those verified by the control kernels for first-order hyperbolic coupled systems, which were recently found to be well-posed. The result therefore applies in this case, allowing us to prove H^1 stability for the closed-loop system. It also shows an interesting connection between backstepping kernels for coupled parabolic and hyperbolic problems.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro

Control and State Estimation of the One-Phase Stefan Problem via Backstepping Design

This paper develops a control and estimation design for the one-phase Stefan problem. The Stefan problem represents a liquid-solid phase transition as time evolution of a temperature profile in a liquid-solid material and its moving interface. This physical process is mathematically formulated as a diffusion partial differential equation (PDE) evolving on a time-varying spatial domain described by an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The state-dependency of the moving interface makes the coupled PDE-ODE system a nonlinear and challenging problem. We propose a full-state feedback control law, an observer design, and the associated output-feedback control law via the backstepping method. The designed observer allows estimation of the temperature profile based on the available measurement of solid phase length. The associated output-feedback controller ensures the global exponential stability of the estimation errors, the H1- norm of the distributed temperature, and the moving interface to the desired setpoint under some explicitly given restrictions on the setpoint and observer gain. The exponential stability results are established considering Neumann and Dirichlet boundary actuations.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro

A De Giorgi Iteration-based Approach for the Establishment of ISS Properties for Burgers' Equation with Boundary and In-domain Disturbances

This note addresses input-to-state stability (ISS) properties with respect to (w.r.t.) boundary and in-domain disturbances for Burgers' equation. The developed approach is a combination of the method of De~Giorgi iteration and the technique of Lyapunov functionals by adequately splitting the original problem into two subsystems. The ISS properties in $L^2$-norm for Burgers' equation have been established using this method. Moreover, as an application of De~Giorgi iteration, ISS in $L^\infty$-norm w.r.t. in-domain disturbances and actuation errors in boundary feedback control for a 1-$D$ {linear} {unstable reaction-diffusion equation} have also been established. It is the first time that the method of De~Giorgi iteration is introduced in the ISS theory for infinite dimensional systems, and the developed method can be generalized for tackling some problems on multidimensional spatial domains and to a wider class of nonlinear {partial differential equations (PDEs)Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication by IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, and is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2018.2880160. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1710.0991