Section: Application Domains

Biological depollution

These works will be carried out with the LBE , mainly on anaerobic treatment plants. This process, despite its strong advantages (methane production and reduced sludge production) can have several locally stable equilibria. In this sense, proposing reliable strategies to stabilize and optimise this process is a key issue. Because of the recent (re)development of anaerobic digestion, it is crucial to propose validated supervision algorithms for this technology. A problem of growing importance is to take benefit of various waste sources in order to adapt the substrate quality to the bacterial biomass activity and finally optimize the process. This generates new research topics for designing strategies to manage the fluxes of the various substrate sources meeting at the same time the depollution norms and providing a biogas of constant quality. In the past years, we have developed models of increasing complexity. However there is a key step that must be considered in the future: how to integrate the knowledge of the metabolisms in such models which represent the evolution of several hundreds bacterial species? How to improve the models integrating this two dimensional levels of complexity? With this perspective, we wish to better represent the competition between the bacterial species, and drive this competition in order to maintain, in the process, the species with the highest depollution capability. This approach, initiated in [88] must be extended from a theoretical point of view and validated experimentally.