Adaptive control technique for a propagation bioprocess carried out inside a fixed bed reactor

This paper presents the design and analysis of adaptive and robust-adaptive control strategies for a nonlinear propagation bioprocesses carried out inside a fixed bed reactor. The design schemes are developed under the realistic assumption that both bacterial growth rates and influent flow rates are time-varying and uncertain, but some lower and upper bounds of these uncertainties are known. The proposed control structures are achieved by combining a linearizing control law with an appropriately state asymptotic observer or an interval observer and with a parameter estimator used for on-line estimation of unknown kinetics. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is validated by numerical simulations applied in the case of a prototype fixed bed bioprocess.