Feedback ratiometric control of two microbial populations in a single chemostat

Abstract

We address the problem of controlling the dilution rate in a chemostat to regulate the ratio between the concentrations of two microbial populations growing in continuous culture. After analyzing the open-loop dynamics of this multicellular system, we present two alternative feedback control strategies, one based on a gain-scheduled state feedback controller, the other on a switching control strategy. We show that both strategies are effective in solving the problem and illustrate the results by a set of representative numerical simulation.