초록
<P><B>Abstract</B></P><P>The goal of this work is to present a closed-loop operational strategy in order to improve the butanol production in an anaerobic continuous bioreactor for the called Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) process. The proposed control scheme considers a class of feedback signal which includes a nonlinear bounded function of the regulation error. The control scheme is applied to a phenomenological unstructured kinetic model obtained from an experimental and metabolic study of butanol production by<I>Clostridium acetobutylicum</I>, which allows the proposed structure to predict several operational conditions from batch and continuous regimes. Numerical experiments using the proposed model considering continuous operation were performed in order to find a feasible operating region for maximum butanol production at open-loop regime. The proposed methodology is applied to regulate the product concentration, manipulating the dilution rate to lead to a higher butanol productivity. The closed-loop behaviour of the bioreactor is analysed, finding that the proposed controller minimizes the response time of the system and allows it to achieve a productivity gain of 55 % over open-loop operation. Further numerical experiments show the satisfactory closed-loop performance of the proposed methodology in comparison with a PI controller.</P>