Application of ϵ-method to the class of linear systems applicable in chemical engineering

Abstract This paper is concerned with linear dynamic systems whose matrix is tridiagonal. Processes of interest to chemical engineers can be approximated by such systems. The large dimensionality of these processes requires large amounts of computation for their solution. One way to overcome this difficulty is to use the ϵ-method for an approximate computation of the optimal control, decoupling the linear dynamic system into two subsystems. In extremely large scale systems, the subsystems resulting after decoupling of the system into a number of subsystems is proposed; this results in new design specifications for near-optimal control. A twelve-plate chemical absorption tower illustrates the procedure.