Observability of bacterial growth models in bubble column bioreactors

Observability being the dual of controllability is an advisable property for any dynamic model of bio-based chemical production processes encompassing substrate consumption, bacterial growth and products formation. In this study we show a mathematical model of these processes and present a novel observability analysis. The invertibility properties of the observability mapping of this model in a space-time domain are analysed independently of the discretization of such domains and indicate the existence of subdomains where the measurement of the output may not be sufficiently accurate to allow reconstructing the states of the system.