In this paper, the problem of controlling the dissolved oxygen level (DO) during an aerobic fermentation is considered. The proposed approach deals with three major difficulties in respect to the nonlinear dynamics of the DO, the poor accuracy of the empirical models for the oxygen consumption rate and the fact that only sampled measurements are available on-line. A nonlinear integral high-gain control law including a continuous-discrete time observer is designed to keep the DO in the neighborhood of a set point value without any knowledge on the dissolved oxygen consumption rate. The local stability of the control algorithm is proved using Lyapunov tools. The performance of the control scheme is first analyzed in simulation and then experimentally evaluated during a successfull fermentation of the bacteria over a period of three days. Pseudomonas putida mt-2
This paper focuses on the multivariable control of a drawing tower process. The nature of the process together with the differences in measurement noise levels that affect the variables to be controlled motivated the development of a new MPC algorithm. An extension of a multivariable predictive control algorithm with separated prediction horizons is proposed. The obtained experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed algorithm..
This paper describes an early lumping approach for generating a mathematical model of the heating process of a moving dual-layer substrate. The heat is supplied by convection and nonlinearly distributed over the whole considered spatial extend of the substrate. Using CFD simulations as a reference, two different modelling approaches have been investigated in order to achieve the most suitable model type. It is shown that due to the possibility of using the transition matrix for time discretization, an equivalent circuit model achieves superior results when compared to the Crank-Nicolson method. In order to maintain a constant sampling time for the in-visioned-control strategies, the effect of variable speed is transformed into a system description, where the state vector has constant length but a variable number of non-zero entries. The handling of the variable transport speed during the heating process is considered as the main contribution of this work. The result is a model, suitable for being used in future control strategies.
