ESTIMATION AND CONTROL OF A CONTINUOUS ALCOHOLIC FERMENTATION PROCESS

This paper deals with the problem of simultaneous regulation and tracking of substrate concentration in a continuous-flow fermentation plant. The process is described by a set of non-linear differential equations obtained from mass-balance considerations, from which a discrete-time model is derived. Due to an on-line measurement of the substrate, the estimation of the consumption rate, considered as a time varying parameter, is carried out using an adaptive filtering scheme. The reconstruction of the substrate noise-polluted concentration is also provided by this filtering scheme. An adaptive pole placement algorithm is then designed for regulation and tracking of the process. Good experimental results have been obtained, which show the efficiency of this adaptive control scheme in terms of disturbance rejection and transient behaviour.