José Luis Guzmán

Malena Caparroz, Kristina Soltesz, Tore Hägglund et al.

Actuator saturation is a fundamental nonlinearity that significantly degrades the performance of PID-controlled systems by inducing integrator windup, leading to overshoot, slow recovery, and even instability. Although numerous anti-windup strategies have been proposed, their practical tuning remains largely heuristic and suboptimal in many industrial scenarios. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of classical and advanced anti-windup techniques for PI-controlled first-order-plus-dead-time (FOPDT) processes under a wide range of operating conditions. The analysis includes dynamic and instantaneous back-calculation, conditional integration, and adapted schemes. In addition, a novel hybrid anti-windup strategy is proposed, combining conditional integration with dynamic back-calculation to improve responsiveness during saturation, whilst preserving smooth recovery dynamics. Moreover, a key contribution of this work is the development of systematic tuning rules for the tracking time constant in back-calculation schemes, specifically optimised for load-disturbance rejection. These rules are derived from an extensive optimisation study that considers the saturation ratio, controller aggressiveness, and disturbance characteristics. The resulting guidelines provide simple yet effective formulas that achieve near-optimal performance without requiring complex computations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform commonly used heuristic rules, particularly in disturbance rejection scenarios, and provide clear, practical recommendations for selecting and tuning anti-windup strategies in industrial applications.

José González-Hernández, Ainoa Morillas-España, José Luis Guzmán et al.

Thin-layer photobioreactors (TLRs) exhibit fast hydrodynamic and thermal dynamics, strong nonlinear photosynthetic responses and significant time-variability due to irradiance fluctuations and biomass growth. These characteristics challenge conventional model-based control strategies, whose tuning degrades under rapidly changing operating conditions. This work presents the experimental implementation of a model-free control approach, Extremum Seeking Control (ESC), for performance optimization in a semi-industrial thin-layer photobioreactor. Unlike previous studies in raceway ponds, the reduced hydraulic inertia of TLR systems enables the adaptation of this control strategy to accelerate convergence while preserving gradient estimation accuracy. The proposed approach is experimentally compared against classical on-off control and ESC configurations with and without feedforward compensation of solar irradiance. Beyond control performance metrics, biological indicators such as biomass concentration and productivity are evaluated to assess the impact on process efficiency. Results show that the proposed ESC strategy reduced cumulative CO$_2$ consumption by approximately 39 % and decreased the accumulated pH tracking error by more than 60 % compared with conventional on-off control, while biomass- and irradiance-normalised indicators confirmed a more efficient use of injected carbon. These results demonstrate that high-frequency ESC can improve regulation performance and carbon utilisation efficiency in fast photobioreactor systems, highlighting its suitability for thin-layer cultivation under outdoor conditions.

José González-Hernández, Laura Bernacchioni, Ainoa Morillas-España et al.

This work presents the experimental validation of a turbidostat strategy for biomass control in a semi-industrial outdoor raceway reactor. The proposed approach regulates biomass concentration by automatically triggering dilution when the online biomass estimate exceeds a predefined threshold. To ensure safe outdoor operation, dilution was restricted to daylight periods, avoiding biomass removal under low-radiation conditions. The strategy was implemented through an industrial control architecture using an optical monitoring system for online biomass estimation. Experiments were conducted over 14 consecutive days in an 80 m$^2$ (12000 L) raceway reactor. A second parallel reactor operated in chemostat mode, with a nominal dilution of 20 % of the total volume during operating days, provided contextual information under the same outdoor conditions. The analysis focuses on the ability of the sensor-based strategy to configure and maintain the desired biomass concentration, rather than on a direct reactor-to-reactor performance ranking. During the campaign, the biomass threshold in the turbidostat reactor was changed from 1.0 to 0.8 g L$^{-1}$, demonstrating the flexibility enabled by online biomass monitoring. Excluding initial adjustment and transition days, harvested areal productivity increased from 9.52 to 23.20 g m$^{-2}$ d$^{-1}$ after reducing the operating threshold. The overall biomass balance also showed higher net areal productivity in the turbidostat reactor, reaching 20.34 g m$^{-2}$ d$^{-1}$ compared with 11.16 g m$^{-2}$ d$^{-1}$ in the parallel chemostat reactor. These results demonstrate the feasibility of robust turbidostat-based biomass control in large-scale outdoor raceway photobioreactors.