Modelling and adaptive control of aerobic continuous stirred tank reactors

A biotechnological aerobic process is modelled as an ordinary differential equation which, under mild assumptions, ensures invariance of the positive orthant and boundedness of the concentrations. An adaptive controller is designed for this general class of processes so that the external substrate can be regulated by the dilution rate into a prespecified arbitrarily small neighbourhood of a constant setpoint reference The adaptive controller is robust, simple in its design without invoking any, identification mechanisms, and is based on output data only. It is shown that the prominent example of a baker's yeast fermentation belongs to this setup, and adaptive tracking is illustrated by simulations.