Feedback Control of a Recirculating Bioreactor with Electrophoretic Removal of Inhibitory Extracellular DNA
This work addresses productivity issues in bioprocesses for industries like biotechnology, but it is incremental as it applies existing control methods to a specific setup.
The paper tackled the problem of extracellular DNA accumulation inhibiting microbial growth in recirculating bioreactors by developing a feedback control framework with electrophoretic DNA removal, resulting in the MPC strategy achieving significantly higher cumulative profit while maintaining DNA below the inhibition threshold in simulations.
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.