Optimal operating parameter determination and modeling to enhance methane production from macroalgae

This work aims at proposing a robust strategy to determine the optimal operating parameters based on fuzzy modeling for enhancing the productivity of methane using Pelvetia canaliculata. The applied strategy is a combination of fuzzy logic (FL) modeling and particle swarm optimizer (PSO). First, FL is used to build a model that describes methane production using the experimental datasets. Second, a PSO algorithm is used to obtain the best-operating conditions of the production process. The decision variables used in the optimization process are beating time and the feedstock/inoculum ratio (F/I). Each parameter was studied for three different values. The beating time was set at 0, 30, and 60 min while the F/I ratio was set at 0.3, 0.5, and 0.7. To assess the resulting performance, a comparison study was carried out between the optimized results thought proposed strategy and those obtained by using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The FL model produced a higher accuracy, i.e., lower values of Root Mean Squared Errors (RMSEs), compared with the RSM. Therefore, the obtained results confirmed that the proposed strategy is better than RSM.