Numerical aspects of optimal control of penicillin production

Abstract

Since their discovery, fermentation processes have gone along not only with the industrial beverages production and breweries, but since the times of Alexander Fleming, they have become a crucial part of the health care due to antibiotics production. However, complicated dynamics and strong nonlinearities cause that the production with the use of linear control methods achieves only suboptimal yields. From the variety of nonlinear approaches, gradient method has proved the ability to handle these issues--nevertheless, its potential in the field of fermentation processes has not been revealed completely. This paper describes constant vaporization control strategy based on a double-input optimization approach with a successful reduction to a single-input optimization task. To accomplish this, model structure used in the previous work is modified so that it corresponds with the new optimization strategy. Furthermore, choice of search step is explored and various alternatives are evaluated and compared.

Mathematical Modeling of Batch Antibiotic Production: Comparative Analysis between Phenomenological and Empirical Approaches

“…When comparing Equations (4) and (5), one can establish the following relationships between the parameters of the empirical and phenomenological models:…”

“…Although specific antibiotics have proven to be effective in the treatment of diseases, some of these are still not sold in the market due to the low productivity of the bioprocess and to the difficulty in the purification stage, which leads to a high cost for medications [4]. In these cases, the optimization of the production and bio-product recovery processes become necessary, and mathematical modeling is a modern and powerful tool for this end [5,6].…”