In the fine chemical industry, the batch or fed-batch reactor functions as the heart of the transformation process. Due to the complexity of chemical synthesis, the control of these reactors remains a problem of temperature control commonly performed indirectly via the jacket of the reactor. This results in a cascade control scheme based on the control a secondary, more responsive process that influences the main process. This control loop is often referred to as the slave loop of the process. This paper highlights that the slave process of batch process units, i.e. the jacket of the reactor, can have more complex dynamics than the master loop has; and very often this could be the reason for the non-satisfying control performance. Since the slave process is determined by the mechanical construction of the unit, the above mentioned problem can be effectively handled by a model-based controller designed using an appropriate nonlinear tendency model. The presented analysis shows that the complex dynamics of the slave process can be decomposed into static nonlinear and dynamic linear parts. This decomposition is beneficial since it allows the effective incorporation of the resulted tendency model into nonlinear model-based control algorithms. Real-time control results show that the proposed methodology gives superior control performance over the widely applied cascade PID-PID control scheme. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.