In the pursuit of generic methods, control theory has become separated from its prime objective : the control of physical systems. These generic techniques have a wide range of applications yet do not easily allow inclusion of system specific information into the control design. There are two important categories for which the inclusion of system-specific information is important : partially-known systems and non-linear systems. Physical-Model Based Control (PMBC) is a novel approach to using such system-specific information. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the experimental application of PMBC to a partially-known nonlinear system. In so doing, the performance of the PMBC method is evaluated, and it is demonstrated how process and control engineering insights can be combined within this PMBC framework to yield a novel system-specific control algorithm.