There are many distributed processes in the chemical industry as it is the case of tubular reactors in which the parameters or the structure of the reaction terms are only a rough approximation of reality. In order to efficiently control this kind of systems, it is important to take into account this lack of detailed information (robustness). In this work, we make use of the classical theory on the robust nonlinear control for finite dimensional systems and extend it to distributed process systems by taking advantage of the special nature of dissipative systems. In this way, theoretical issues related to the nonlinearity of the diffusion terms and inhomogeneous boundary conditions are handled by means of the Kirchhoff and state transformations, respectively. In addition, and for practical reasons, the problem of controller saturation is considered. The different aspects of the methodology will be illustrated through a number of computational experiments concerning non-isothermal tubular reactors with convection and/or diffusion terms. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.