A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING THE STATE VARIABLES AND PARAMETERS OF FERMENTATION SYSTEMS

A major difficulty in the monitoring and control of bioprocesses is th e lack of reliable and simple sensors for following the evolution of t he main state variables and parameters such as biomass, substrate, pro duct and growth rate. An adaptive estimation algorithm is proposed to recover the state and parameters in bioprocesses. This estimator utili ses the physical process model and the reference model approach. Exper iments concerning estimation of biomass and product concentrations and specific growth rate, during batch, fed-batch and continuous fermenta tion processes are presented. The results show the performance of this adaptive estimation approach.