Lyapunov-Based Observer Design for Steam Boilers

Steam boilers are widely used in industrial applications ranging from air conditioning to power plants. Advanced control schemes for such boilers require the knowledge of internal state variables, which are not always measurable. This paper proposes a new observer for steam boilers whose construction builds on a special state variable choice and a Lyapunov-based design of the observer gains. Tuning insight is gained from an oscillator-like structure of the (linearised) observer error dynamics. Comparisons to an extended Kalman filter in simulations and on experimental data from a small-scale automotive application demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.