Antonio Spallone, Davide Fiore, Fabrizio Cartenì et al.
Extracellular DNA accumulation in recirculating bioprocesses inhibits microbial growth and reduces productivity. We consider a continuous bioreactor with a recirculating loop and an electrophoretic filtration unit for selective DNA removal, and develop a feedback control framework combining online state and parameter estimation via an Unscented Kalman Filter with two control strategies: an adaptive Model Predictive Controller that jointly optimizes dilution rate and filtration activation, and a simpler bang--bang filtration policy with lookup-table dilution rate selection. Closed-loop simulations under nominal and perturbed conditions show that the MPC strategy achieves significantly higher cumulative profit while keeping DNA concentration below the inhibition threshold.