On-line states and parameter identification of acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation process

In the present work, the use of extended Kalman filter (EKF) to infer the outlet compositions and growth rate of the acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation process from outlet gas CO2 measurement has been discussed. In order to tune the filter (Q matrix), different methods consist of trial and error; Loan, Mont Carlo simulations and continuous case have been investigated for process noise covariance matrix. The reliability of the developed estimator is discussed with respect to disturbance on CO2 concentration. The performance of the estimator has been evaluated by comparison with other filters such as Wiener and linearized Kalman filter as well as simulation and experimental results. The results show, EKF estimator provides good agreement with the composition values measured off-line while Q is adjusting by Loan method.