In this note, a feedback boundary controller for an unstable heat equation is designed. The equation can be viewed as a model of a thin rod with not only the heat loss to a surrounding medium (stabilizing) but also the heat generation inside the rod (destabilizing). The heat generation adds a destabilizing linear term on the right-hand side of the equation. The boundary control law designed is in the form of an integral operator with a known, continuous kernel function but can be interpreted as a backstepping control law. This interpretation provides a Lyapunov function for proving stability of the system. The control is applied by insulating one end of the rod and applying either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary actuation on the other.

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In this paper a family of stabilizing boundary feedback control laws for a class of linear parabolic PDEs motivated by engineering applications is presented. The design procedure presented here can handle systems with an arbitrary finite number of open-loop unstable eigenvalues and is not restricted to a particular type of boundary actuation. Stabilization is achieved through the design of coordinate transformations that have the form of recursive relationships. The fundamental di‰culty of such transformations is that the recursion has an infinite number of iterations. The problem of feedback gains growing unbounded as the grid becomes infinitely fine is resolved by a proper choice of the target system to which the original system is transformed. We show how to design coordinate transformations such that they are su‰ciently regular (not continuous but L y ). We then establish closed-loop stability, regularity of control, and regularity of solutions of the PDE. The result is accompanied by a simulation study for a linearization of a tubular chemical reactor around an unstable steady state.

SUMMARYIn this paper a globally stabilizing feedback boundary control law for an arbitrarily fine discretization of a one-dimensional nonlinear PDE model of unstable burning in solid propellant rockets is presented. The PDE has a destabilizing boundary condition imposed on one part of the boundary. We discretize the original nonlinear PDE model in space using finite difference approximation and get a high order system of coupled nonlinear ODEs. Then, using backstepping design for parabolic PDEs, properly modified to accommodate the imposed destabilizing nonlinear boundary condition at the burning end, we transform the original system into a target system that is asymptotically stable in l 2 -norm with the same type of boundary condition at the burning end, and homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition at the control end.