Optimal Control of Microalgae Growth in Artificially Lighted Photobioreactors : Case study: closed-loop solution for a bilocal optimization problem

Abstract

This paper states and solves a specific optimal control problem. The process refers to microalgae growth in Artificially Lighted Photobioreactors. There are many results concerning microalgae growth models, including the photobioreactor type used in this work. The paper describes a growth’s dynamic model used in control problems and integrated into the bilocal optimal control problem, which this work addresses. The authors propose the Receding Horizon Control as the technique used to implement the closed-loop control structure. A simple method to calculate the optimal predictions is proposed and integrated into the optimal controller. The simulations proved that the approach is realistic and gives very good results.