Copyright © 2010 Gongxian Xu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper deals with robust control of continuous bioprocesses. According to the material balance equations of continuous bioprocesses, a uniform framework for mathematical modeling of this class of processes is first presented. Then a robust controller is designed by using the H∞ mixed sensitivity method for the biotechnology processes. The corresponding control objective is described as the development of a robust reference-tracking control structure with the best possible disturbance compensation, able to cope with variations in key process parameters. Finally, the proposed robust control strategy is applied to bio-dissimilation process of glycerol to 1, 3-propanediol. Simulation results are given which show that the designed robust controller makes the system have a favourable robust tracking performance.