Guaranteed cost boundary control of the semilinear heat equation

We consider a 1D semilinear reaction-diffusion system with controlled heat flux at one of the boundaries. We design a finite-dimensional state-feedback controller guaranteeing that a given quadratic cost does not exceed a prescribed value for all nonlinearities with a predefined Lipschitz constant. To this end, we perform modal decomposition and truncate the highly damped (residue) modes. To deal with the nonlinearity that couples the residue and dominating modes, we combine the direct Lyapunov approach with the S-procedure and Parseval’s identity. The truncation may lead to spillover: the ignored modes can deteriorate the overall system performance. Our main contribution is spillover avoidance via the L2 separation of the residue. Namely, we calculate the L2 input-to-state gains for the residue modes and add them to the control weight in the quadratic cost used to design a controller for the dominating modes. A numerical example demonstrates that the proposed idea drastically improves both the admissible Lipschitz constants and guaranteed cost bound compared to the recently introduced direct Lyapunov method.