State Estimation in Fermentation of Lignocellulosic Ethanol. Focus on the Use of pH Measurements

Abstract The application of the continuous-discrete extended Kalman filter (CD-EKF) as a powerful tool for state estimation in biochemical systems is assessed here. Using a fermentation process for ethanol production as a case study, the CD-EKF can effectively estimate the model states even when highly non-linear measurements such as pH are included. Several configurations of the CD-EKF are tested and it is seen that including pH, which is a readily available measurement in virtually every biochemical process, provides information that significantly improves the performance of the filter.