Kinetics independent multivariable robust control of animal cell cultures

This paper presents a multivariable robust control structure for perfusion animal cell cultures. The control structure assumes a cascade form, where a linearizing feedback controller is used in the inner loop and linear controllers are used in the outer loops, to simultaneously control the cells concentration and the glucose concentration in the bioreactor. The growth rates needed by the linearizing controller are robustly estimated using sliding mode observers (SMO). Aside the effectiveness and the simplicity of the implementation and tuning, the proposed control scheme has the advantage that it does not require the knowledge of the process kinetics structure, which is generally difficult to identify.