On-line estimation of microbial specific growth rates

Abstract

Continuous time algorithms for the on-line estimation of microbial specific growth rates of fermentation processes are proposed. An important feature of the proposed algorithm is that they do not require any kind of analytical description of the specific growth rate which is simply considered as an unknown bounded time varying parameter. Four different input-output configurations are considered. In each case, the stability and convergence properties of the algorithms are described and their feasibility is illustrated by real life experiments.