Effective operation of heat exchangers involves optimum control of the fluid outlet temperature. Several ideas have been proposed in the literature to cope with intrinsic resonance dynamics aimed at widening the bandwidth of the closed-loop system to achieve fast, welldamped responses in controlling the outlet fluid temperature by means of the steam temperature. This is also the main purpose of this article, in which the use of a repetitive control scheme is proposed to take resonance dynamics into account when residence time is variable, as in this case the control variable is the fluid flow rate and not the steam temperature. The scheme is based on a model of the tubular heat exchanger dynamics in which the explicit terms of resonance are cancelled out by the controller. Simulation results are provided both for a typical tubular heat exchanger and for a special sort of heat exchanger, the distributed collector field of a solar power plant. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.