ROBUST REGULATION OF VOLATILE FATTY ACIDS IN AN ANAEROBIC DIGESTER

This paper deals with the robust regulation of volatile fatty acids (VFA) in an anaerobic digester. The digester is used for the treatment of industrial wine distillery wastewater. The robust approach is composed by an input-output linearizing feedback control and a Luenberger observer used to achieve the VFA regulation in spite of modelling errors (uncertain kinetics), actuator restrictions and load perturbations due to uncertain changes in the influent composition. The robust stability of the control approach is evaluated via numerical simulations under different operation conditions.