Section: New Results

Selection of microalgae

Participants : Walid Djema, Laetitia Giraldi, Olivier Bernard [BIOCORE project-team] .

We investigate a minimal-time control problem in a chemostat continuous photo-bioreactor model that describes the dynamics of two distinct microalgae populations. Our objective is to optimize the time of separation between two species of microalgae by controlling the dilution rate. We focus on Droop's model. Using Pontryagin's principle, we develop a dilution-based control strategy that steers the model trajectories to a suitable target in minimal time. Our study reveals that the optimal solution has a turpike property [14] [27]. A numerical optimal-synthesis, based on direct optimal control tools, is performed in [15] and it shows that the optimal solution is of type bang-singular.