Experimental Results in Adaptive Control of Biotechnological Processes

Robust and performance oriented adaptive control has been developped on a variety of industrial plants and benchmarks (ACC88, ACC89) during the last few years. Nevertheless a general purpose adaptive control has many design parameters which have to be chosen depending on a priori information about the particular plant To overcome this difficulty, one can derive dedicated versions of adaptive control for specific classes of plants. In this paper, the SARTA general purpose adaptive control is experimented on a biotechnological continuous fermentation plant in order to design a class oriented adaptive control for the regulation of the substrate concentration. Alcoholic fermentation processes present many control problems due to their non-linear characteristics. The alcohol production dynamic depends on the substrate concentration which is a function of bacterial activity. Temperature and sourness factor can also alter this activity.