Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

• The characterization of interconnections of chemostats that provide a global stability of bioprocesses with inhibition, mentioned in Section 6.1.1 , has led to a patent application by INRA [59] .

• Anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBR) have a great potential for treating wastewater since they allow energy recovery (the biogas produced is mostly composed of methane) while guaranteeing a total separation of the treated water and of the microbial content of the process. However, their main drawback is the fouling of the membrane. In order to control the process while limiting the risk of clogging, we have developed a new model for AnMBR in coupling a two-step anaerobic model (called the “AM2” or the “AMOCO” model) with a model describing fouling dynamics [16] .

• We have proposed hybrid models (deterministic/stochastic and continuous/discrete) of population dynamics as alternatives to conventional models based on ordinary differential equations. The later models are generally accepted as a good approximation of the former ones in large population asymptotic, but even in very large population size the two groups of models present drastically different behavior, notably in terms of persistence properties [15] , see Section 6.1.5 .