Batch and semi-batch chemical reactors are extensively used in polymer, fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The temperature control is of fundamental importance from product quality and reproductibility points of view. It is then necessary to improve the automation of these plants which are typically controlled using standard PID controllers. An autotuning PID controller is proposed and evaluated by application to a batch and semi-batch pilot plant reactor to investigate advanced control techniques. The involved control design is derived in the spirit of the partial state reference model adaptive control (PSRMAC) approach within the delta operator formulation. PSRMAC is mainly motivated by its suitable tracking capability when only a crude knowledge about the plant to be controlled is available. The delta operator formualtion is particularly motivated by the convergence of the performances to their continuous time counterpart as well as its numerical robustness when the sampling is required to be fast.