Production rate estimation in processes with high cell concentration

This work focuses in the estimation of the specific production rate of intracellular products in fed-batch processes, for the case where high cell densities are present. Particularly, a new volume model is proposed for the high cell density case where a large amount of intracellular product is stored. Based on the model ant the on-line volume measurement, a high order sliding mode observer is proposed to estimate the specific production rate. The observer achieves finite time convergence and robustness against model disturbances and model uncertainty, while it does not require for a kinetic model of the production rate. The proposed algorithm is evaluated whith numerical simulations and experimentally.