This paper deals with the control of an autonomous periodic fixed-bed reactor, which is called circulation loop reactor (CLR). This process can be described by a distributed parameter system with sustained oscillations. The state variables at some positions of such a process, e.g. the conversion at the reactor exit, may be required to vary in a smooth fashion, which in general is a difficult task due to the process＇s inherent complex behavior. Here, a straightforward control strategy of the CLR based on direct exit concentration regulation is presented. A relay feedback controller is found to be effective for achieving overall conversion while using relatively small external heating. In order to implement the control scheme without on-line concentration measurement, a nonlinear inferential control concept is adopted. A newly-developed nonlinear distributed parameter observer is used to infer the exit concentration from the temperature measurements at only a few positions. Moreover, an approach based on integrating a disturbance estimator is presented for improving the performance of the observer in the case of unmeasured inlet concentration. It is found that there exist simple determinate relations between the inlet variables or the model parameters and the maximum amplitude or the period of the oscillatory temperature at an axial position for the considered cases. By employing the oscillatory feature of the CLR, a method of estimating the inlet concentration is proposed, and a parameter estimation method based on the least square technique is given to update offline model parameters. It is shown that substantial benefits could be realized using the proposed nonlinear inferential control scheme for the CLR because it can provide excellent disturbance rejection capabilities and strong robustness.