“…In this work, we consider optimal control of irreversible pH systems [25,24] accounting both for the energy conservation and the entropy creation. Thereby, we extend our previous works on minimzing the energy supply in the linear pH setting [30,19,8] to the class of nonlinear irreversible pH systems, that is, we aim for a state transition with minimal energy, entropy, or exergy supply, respectively linear combinations thereof. We prove that, under suitable assumptions, a state transition that is optimal with respect to these metrics is always performed in a neighborhood of the set of thermodynamical equilibria for the majority of the time.…”