Control of fermenters – a review

Fermenter control has been an active area of research and has attracted more attention in recent years. This is due to the new developments in other related areas which can be exploited to overcome the inherent difficulties in fermenter control. Beginning with conventional regulatory control of operating variables such as temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen concentration, research in fermenter control has undergone significant changes including the recent neural network based approaches. The objective of the paper is to focus the attention of the researchers to the developments in the control of batch, fed-batch and continuous fermenters over the past few years.