Distributed Control Systems for a Wastewater Treatment Plant: Architectures and Advanced Control Solutions

This chapter is focused on the development and implementation of a distributed and hierarchized control system for the wastewater treatment plant (WTP) Calafat, Romania. The primary control loops for both treatment lines (water and activated sludge) are developed and analyzed. Also, the distributed control system (DCS) architecture of the wastewater treatment plant is presented, and the advantages of the proposed control structure are highlighted. In order to increase the performance of the overall control system, some advanced control solutions are investigated. More precisely, multivariable adaptive and robust control algorithms are proposed for the activated sludge bioprocess. Several realistic simulation experiments are performed, and the obtained results are analyzed

Mammalian Cell Culture Process for Monoclonal Antibody Production: Nonlinear Modelling and Parameter Estimation

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are at present one of the fastest growing products of pharmaceutical industry, with widespread applications in biochemistry, biology, and medicine. The operation of mAbs production processes is predominantly based on empirical knowledge, the improvements being achieved by using trial-and-error experiments and precedent practices. The nonlinearity of these processes and the absence of suitable instrumentation require an enhanced modelling effort and modern kinetic parameter estimation strategies. The present work is dedicated to nonlinear dynamic modelling and parameter estimation for a mammalian cell culture process used for mAb production. By using a dynamical model of such kind of processes, an optimization-based technique for estimation of kinetic parameters in the model of mammalian cell culture process is developed. The estimation is achieved as a result of minimizing an error function by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed estimation approach is analyzed in this work by using a particular model of mammalian cell culture, as a case study, but is generic for this class of bioprocesses. The presented case study shows that the proposed parameter estimation technique provides a more accurate simulation of the experimentally observed process behaviour than reported in previous studies