Instrumentation and design of a supervisory system for an Anaerobic Biodigestor

This paper presents the design of a supervisory system of an Anaerobic Biodigestor pilot plant located at Universidad de Ibagué in Colombia to produce Biogas. This contribution includes the design of a reliable low-cost instrumentation; whereby, the correct selection, implementation, and calibration of sensors of temperature, pH, CO₂, CH₄, and gas flow play an important role in accomplishing a good design. The supervisory system is used to perform tasks of fault-detection and on-line measuring; where the last one is essential for modeling by extracting kinetic information of the degradation process and automatic control. Labview^® was chosen as the software platform to develop the supervisory system.