The extraction of energy from biomass in the form of biogas has strongly increased worldwide in the last 20 years. Large-scale government programmes aimed at encouraging renewable forms of energy within the European Union as well as the boost given by the United Nations to the construction of biogas plants in developing countries are providing a push towards innovation in the field of the development of new technologies in an up-and-coming biogas market.
In agriculture, the intelligent control of biogas plants is gaining more and more importance in view of the increasing cost of substrates and the slowly falling payments for electricity. The aim is to increase the efficiency of biogas plants through making heavy use of the capacity of the plant, without interfering with the fermentation biology.
The challenge in this connection lies in the recording of the current operational state, as it involves a biological decomposition process and, accordingly, one which varies a lot. It is absolutely necessary to be able to identify this operational state in order to design an appropriate control strategy.
Through the application of new methods, our team has a lot of experience with regard to this subject. The development of a new type of control concept, using computational intelligence (CI) methods, allows the best possible conditions to be set for efficient plant operation.
