4th International Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE 2015)

IGEE, Boumerdes, December 13th -15th, 2015

State Estimation of Nonlinear Distributed Parameter

Systems Based on the Tangent Transformations
Dyhia BENAMEUR, Ahmed MAIDI and Sad DJENNOUNE
Laboratoire de Conception et de Conduite des Syst`emes de Production (L2CSP)
Universite Mouloud MAMMERI de Tizi-Ouzou, Algerie
Emails: b dyhia@hotmail.fr, ahmed.maidi@gmail.com, s djennoune@yahoo.fr
AbstractThis paper deals with the state estimation of nonlinear distributed parameter systems. Thus, based on the tangent
transformations theory, a state estimation scheme is proposed.
The proposed design approach consists in linearizing the nonlinear distributed parameter systems using a bijective tangent
transformation. Then, an observer is designed for the obtained
equivalent linear distributed parameter system and by using the
inverse of the tangent transformation, the estimate of the state
of the nonlinear system can be obtained from the estimate state
of the equivalent linear model. The effectiveness of the proposed
estimation strategy is demonstrated through simulation in the
case of a nonlinear heat equation that describes the temperature
evolution in a steel plate.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Distributed parameter systems (DPSs) are characterized by
an infinite dimensional state [1], [2]. The dynamical behavior
of a distributed parameter system (DPS) is described by partial
differential equations (PDEs) [3]. Controller design for DPS
can be achieved following either the early or the late lumping
approaches [1]. Both approaches leads to a controller of high
dimension that involves the state of the DPS. Thus, due to the
dimension of the state, the implementation of the controller
needs the availability of the whole state. From practical point
of view, in addition to the noise that affects the measurements,
to have the whole state one needs to place all necessary sensors
which is physical impossible and very expensive.
Thus, an interesting and economical solution is to use
an observer to estimate the whole state of the DPS. State
estimation theory of DPSs constitutes an active research area
[3], [4]. If for linear DPSs, this theory is well-established, for
nonlinear DPSs few contributions are reported in the literature
and limited to bilinear DPSs [5]. For nonlinear DPSs, the
state estimation is more complex due to their nonlinear nature,
which needs sophisticated mathematical tools for both design
and convergence analysis of the observer.
In this paper, one propose to exploit the well-developed
state estimation theory of linear DPSs to design observers
for nonlinear DPSs. The idea is based on the use of tangent
transformations [6], which represent an interesting mathematical tool that simplifies the analysis of some nonlinear PDEs.
These transformations, under some sound assumptions, allow
to convert a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) to
a linear one. This idea is exploited in this work to design
an observer for a nonlinear DPS. Thus, by linearizing the
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c
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nonlinear DPS using a tangent transformation, an observer

can be designed for the obtained linear DPS. Then, from the
estimate state of the linear DPS, one deduce the estimate
state of the nonlinear DPS using the inverse of the used
tangent transformation. The proposed state estimation strategy
is adopted to estimate the temperature evolution in the heat
steel plate in the case of noisy measurements and in the case
of boundary sensing.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the state
estimation problem is formulated in Section II. Section III is
devoted to the state estimation of linear DPSs while Section IV
gives an idea about the tangent transformations. The proposed
state estimation strategy is presented in Section V and its
performance are evaluated in the case of a nonlinear heat
equation in Section VI. The paper ends with a conclusion.
II. P ROBLEM FORMULATION
Consider the class of one-dimensional nonlinear DPS described by the the following state equation
x(z, t)
= F(x(z, t)) + (1 ) Gu(z, t)
t
with the following boundary conditions
x(0, t)
+ c01 x(0, t) = u(t)
z
x(L, t)
cL
+ cL
0
1 x(L, t) = (1 ) u(t)
z
and the initial condition
c00

x(z, 0) = x0 (z)

(1)

(2)
(3)

(4)

where t [0, ) and z = [0, L] are the time

and space variables, respectively. is the spatial domain.
x(z, t) H = L2 (z, t) is the state of the system and H
being the Hilbert space. u(z, t) is the manipulated variable.
F and G are bounded spatial differential operators assumed
L
to be nonlinear and linear, respectively. c00 , c01 , cL
0 and c1 are
given constants that fix the type of the boundary conditions
(Dirichlet, Neumann or Fourier). {0, 1} is a parameter
that define the type of actuation, that is, for = 0, the control
acts on the spatial domain while for = 1, the control
acts on the boundary of the spatial domain denoted by
= {0, L}. For the boundary actuation, one distinguish the
left-hand end and the right-hand end actuations that correspond

2015 IEEE

to = 1 and = 0, respectively. x0 (z) is a given initial

profile.
In the following, the problem of estimating the whole state
x(z, t) from a noisy measurements x(z, t) + (z, t), with
(z, t) is the unknown measurement errors, is addressed and
both uniformly distributed measurements and punctual sensing
cases are considered.
III. S TATE ESTIMATION OF LINEAR DPS S
In this section, the observer design for linear DPS, based
on the abstract state representation [2], is presented. In this
case, the design of the observer is based on the PDE model
without any approximation or reduction, which yields an
infinite dimensional observer that enhances the performance
in closed-loop [1]. This approach is a generalization of the
observer theory of linear LPSs to linear DPSs.
Consider a linear DPS written under the abstract state
representation [2]
(5)

y(0) = y0

(7)

(6)

where y H is the state of the system, u(t) is the manipulated

variable and y0 H is the initial condition. A, B and C are
bounded linear operators. Note that, a DPS with a boundary
control can be written under this abstract form [2], [7].
Assumption 1: The observation operator C, that acts on the
state y(t), is linear, that is, it verifies C(0) = 0. 
For linear DPS (5)(7), the observer takes the following
form
y (t) = A
y (t) + Bu(t) + L(ym (t) C y(t))

y(0) = y0

x(z, t) = T (y(z, t))

(10)

where x H and y H are the solutions of the nonlinear

and linear PDEs, respectively.
Assumption 2: The nonlinear operator T is bijective, that
is, its inverse T 1 exists and it is bijective. 
Hence having the solution y of the obtained linear PDE,
one can easily deduce the solution x, of the original nonlinear
PDE, using the tangent transformation (10).
Note that some nonlinear PDEs can be converted to linear
ones only under some assumptions. For more details about
the tangent transformation the reader is refereed to [6]. The
Kirchhoff transformation, which is a particular case of the
Cole-Hopf tangent transformation [10], is used to linearize a
nonlinear diffusion equation in Section VI.
V. P ROPOSED STATE ESTIMATION STRATEGY

y(t)
= Ay(t) + Bu(t)

ym (t) = Cy(t)

To linearize a nonlinear PDE using a tangent transformation,

one seeks a continuous operator T of the form

(8)
(9)

where y H is the estimate of the state y. L is the observer

gain operator which is designed so that the operator A LC
generates an exponential stable C0 -semigroup which makes
the estimation error e(t) = y(t) y(t) tend exponentially to
zero as t [2]. State estimation theory of linear DPSs is
well-developed with many interesting contributions and results
[4], [8]. A review of different methods to design the observer
gain operator L can be found in [4] and some application
examples are reported in [2], [3].
IV. TANGENT TRANSFORMATIONS
The theory of some linear PDEs, for instance heat and wave
equations, is well-established and general results concerning
their study are available in the dedicated literature. For nonlinear PDEs there is no generalized theory and the existing
results are valid for particular PDEs. Thus, to take advantage
of the linear PDEs theory, the most effective way is, when it
is possible, to convert the nonlinear PDE to a linear one. This
conversion can be achieved using tangent transformations [6].
Legendre, Cole-Hopf, Bucklund and Laplace transformations
are some well-known tangent transformations.

In Section III, it is pointed out that the state estimation

problem of linear DPSs has been extensively investigated in
the literature and different observer design approaches have
been proposed in the literature. So to take advantage of
these available results in the case of the nonlinear DPSs,
one propose to use a tangent transformation (10) to convert
the nonlinear DPS (1)(4) to the linear DPS (5)(7), then to
design an observer, of the form (8)(9), for the obtained linear
model. This linear observer will provide the estimate y of the
linear DPS and the estimate x
of the nonlinear DPS can be
reconstructed from y using the inverse tangent transformation
(10), that is,
x
(z, t) = T (
y (z, t))
(11)
Proposition: Consider the nonlinear DPS (1)(4) that can
be linearized with the tangent transformation (10) for which
Assumption 2 holds. Then, the following nonlinear observer
y (t) = A
y (t) + Bu(t) + L(ym (t) C y(t))

y(0) = y0

ym (t) = C y(t)
y(t) = T

(12)
(13)
(14)

(x(t))

x
(t) = T (
y (t))

(15)
(16)

provides the estimate x

of the state x of the nonlinear DPS
(1).
Proof: The proposed observer (12)(16) is constructed
around the linear observer (8)(9) designed for the linear DPS
(5)(7) which is obtained by the tangent transformation (10).
Recall that the observer gain operator L is designed such that
the state estimation error e(t) verifies
lim e(t) = lim (ym (t) C y(t)) = 0

(17)

= lim (Cy(t) C y(t)) = 0

(18)

= lim C(y(t) y(t)) = 0

(19)

t
t

and according to the Assumption 1, it follows that

A. Kirchhoff tangent transformation

lim e(t) = lim (y(t) y(t)) = 0

(20)

= lim T 1 (x) T 1 (
x) = 0

(21)

hence
lim T 1 (x) = lim T 1 (
x)

and according to the Assumption 2, it follows that

lim x = lim x

Under the assumption that the ratio = kc is approximately constant, the nonlinear diffusion equation can be
linearized by the Kirchhoff tangent transformation, which is
a particular case of the Cole-Hopf tangent transformation
[10]. This assumption is acceptable from physical viewpoint
since the thermal conductivity changes very slowly with the
temperature x [11]. The Kirchhoff tangent transformation is
defined as follows [10]

y = T 1 (x)
Z x
1
k() d
=
k(0) 0

or equivalently
lim (x x
) = 0

, that is, the state estimation x x

converges exponentially to
zero as t . 
In summary, the structure of the proposed observer for a
nonlinear DPS based on the linear DPS, obtained using a
tangent transformation, is depicted in Figure 1.
Remark 1: The proposed observer (12)(16) is nonlinear
due to the nonlinear operator T and its inverse T 1 .
Remark 2: In the case of filtering, the estimation error does
not converge to zero but the objective is to ensure a bounded
estimation error.
VI. A PPLICATION TO A NONLINEAR DIFFUSION SYSTEM
In this section, the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear
observer (12)(16) is illustrated through numerical simulation
runs by assuming a nonlinear heat diffusion equation that
describes the temperature evolution in a heated steel plate of
length L = 0.25 m and thickness = 102 m. The density ,
the heat capacity c and the thermal conductivity k (thermophysical properties of the steel) are [9]: = 7740 kgm3 and
c(x) = 454 + 0.388 x 3.22 104 x2 + 1.1 107 x3

(23)

where x is the temperature of the plate given in Celsius.

The evolution of the steel plate temperature is described by
a nonlinear diffusion equation, which can be linearized by
the Kirchhoff tangent transformation [10] presented in the
following section.

y = x + 2.4592 106 x2 + 5.8356 1011 x3

Nonlinear DPS (1)

ym

Linear observer (2)

T 1

+
+

B. Filtering problem
For this problem, it is assumed that the whole state x is
available but corrupted with Gaussian white noise signal
of standard deviation = 50 K, that is, the measured state
is xm = x + . In this case, one consider the filtering of
the temperature of the steel plate due to the initial condition
x(z, 0), that is, without heated source. The complete model is


x(z, t)

x(z, t)
c(x(z, t))
=
k(x(z, t))
(27)
t
z
z
x(0, t) = 800 [K]
(28)
x(L, t) = 800 [K]

(29)

x(z, 0) = 800 (z + 1) [K]

(30)

and the Kirchhoff tangent transformation yields the following

linear diffusion system
2 y(z, t)
y(z, t)
=
t
z 2
y(0, t) = T 1 (x(0, t))

y(z, 0) = T

(31)
(32)

(x(L, t))

(33)

(x(z, 0))

(34)

which can be filtered by the following observer [12]

Z L
y(z, t)
2 y(z, t)
=
+
6
sin(z)
(y y) dz
t
z 2
0

ym = y
x

Nonlinear observer

Fig. 1. Structure of the proposed state estimation strategy for a nonlinear

DPS.

(35)

and the proposed nonlinear observer takes the following form

(36)

= xm +
T

(26)

Remark 3: The derivation of the Kirchhoff tangent transformation is discussed in detail in [10].

y(L, t) = T
u

(25)

which yields according to (23),

(22)

k(x) = 23.9 + 1.7155 104 x + 4.1841 109 x2

(24)

2.4592 106 x2m

+ 5.8356 1011 x3m

Z L

y(z, t)
y(z, t)
=
+ 6 sin(z)
t
z 2
y(z, 0) = y(z, 0)
x
= T (
y)

(37)

(ym y) dz

(38)
(39)

C. State estimation

12

y(z, 0) = T 1 (x(z, 0))

q (1z)

(z) = q e

2
0
0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

t [s]
Fig. 2. Filtering problem: evolution of the L2 -norm of the estimate error
e(t).

50
45

(45)

40
35

(46)
(47)

30
25
20
15
10
5
0
0

t [s]

5
4

x 10

Fig. 3. State estimation problem: evolution of the L2 -norm of the estimate

error e(t).

(51)
(52)

hence the following proposed nonlinear observer follows

ym
y
=
z
z
y x
=
x z

(44)

and the problem of the state estimation of the y can be

achieved using a backstepping observer of the following form
[8]


y(z, t)
2 y(z, t)
y(L, t) y(L, t)
=

(z)

t
z 2
z
z
(48)
y(0, t)
q

y(0, t)
(49)
z
k(0)
y(L, t) = T 1 (xL (t))
(50)
y(z, 0) = T 1 (x(z, 0))

(43)

The Kirchhoff tangent transformation yields the following

linear model
y(z, t)
2 y(z, t)
=
t
z 2
q
y(0, t)
=
T (y(0, t))
z
k(0)
y(L, t) = T 1 (xL (t))

ke(t)kL2 ()

x(z, 0) = 180 [K]

10

ke(t)kL2 ()

In this case, it is assumed that there is only one measurement

available at z = L, then the objective is to estimate the whole
state x. The available measurement are the temperature x(L, t)
and the heat flux x/z|z=L . In this case, it is assumed that
the steel plate is heated by applying the temperature xL (t) =
180 (1 et ) [K] at the right-hand end boundary z = L and
= 0. The model is



x(z, t)
x(z, t)
=
k(x(z, t))
(40)
c(x(z, t))
t
z
z
x(0, t)
= q x(0, t) (q = 102 )
(41)
z
x(L, t) = xL (t)
(42)

(53)
(54)

x
z
(55)


y(z, t)
2 y(z, t)
ym (L, t) y(L, t)
=

(z)
t
z 2
z
z
(56)
y(0, t)
q
=
y(0, t)
(57)
z
k(0)
y(L, t) = T 1 (xL (t))
(58)

D. Simulation results
The capabilities of the designed nonlinear observer are
evaluated through numerical simulation runs. The observers
are implemented using the method of lines [13]. The quality
of the results is quantified by assuming the L2 -norm of the
estimation error defined as follows

= 1 + 4.9184 106 x + 17.5068 1011 x2

y(z, 0) = 160 [K]

(59)

x
(z, t) = T (
y (z, t))

(60)

ke(t)k2H=L2 () =

Z
0

x(z, t) x
(z, t)2 dz

(61)

The results obtained for the filtering and the state estimation
are given by Figure 2 and 3, respectively. These Figures show
the good performance of the proposed nonlinear observer in
reconstructing the state. In the case of filtering (Fig. 2), e(t) is
bounded. This is expected because with noisy measurements
it is not possible to achieve a zero estimation error. In the state
estimation case (Fig. 3), it follows that the e(t) converges to
zero.

VII. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a state estimation scheme is proposed for a
nonlinear DPS. The observer developed is constructed around
a linear observer designed for an equivalent linear model
obtained using a tangent transformation. This transformation
represents the relation that exists between the state of the
linear system and the state of nonlinear system. Thus, having
estimate the state of the linear system using well-developed
observers, one can deduce the estimate state of the nonlinear
system using the tangent transformation. The performance of
the proposed observer is demonstrated by simulation in the
case of a nonlinear heat equation.
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