A predictive functional control (PFC) technique is applied to the temperature control of a pilot-plant batch reactor equipped with a mono-fluid heating/cooling system. A cascade control structure has been implemented according to the process sub-units reactor and heating/cooling system. Hereby differences in the sub-units dynamics are taken into consideration. PFC technique is described and its main differences with a standard model predictive control (MPC) technique are discussed. To evaluate its robustness, PFC has been applied to the temperature control of an exothermic chemical reaction. Experimental results show that PFC enables a precise tracking of the set-point temperature and that the PFC performances are mainly determined by its internal dynamic process model. Finally, results show the performance of the cascade control structure to handle different dynamics of the heating/cooling system. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.