Photobioreactor sensor technology fusion for on-line monitoring and control.

This projects aims to empower real-time estimation of biomass and secondary metabolite production rates and creating new possibilities for process control of microalgal cultivation. This will be achieved by developing a new approach for On-Line monitoring microalgal growth and secondary metabolite production by using principles of elemental mass balancing to be established in research as well as industrial scale. In order to access the consumption of different nitrogen sources for biomass growth we plan the development of a Software-Sensor to monitor microalgal uptake of different nitrogen sources based on the control of medium charge, accessed by pH measurements, Carbondioxide consumption rates and further parameters such as Temperature and Medium Salinity. Moreover we will focus on tackling issue of Sensor drifts by implementation of an automatic sensor recalibration method to increase estimation reliability and accuracy of the proposed method. By this we pursue the automatization of laboratory workflow which should increase speed and reliability of experimental research on microalgal growth and productivities. In addition to that we will investigate the feasability of the developed method at pilot plant scale to propose a new control strategy for industrial scale production as well.