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Monitoring and control system for closed microalgae cultures at pilot scale

Recently, there has been increased interest in the cultivation of microalgae due to their many applications. This attention is due to their rapid growth rate and ability to produce valuable metabolites and their promising carbon sequestration potential. From these metabolites, bio-compounds are generated that are useful to achieve sustainable production of microalgae-based technology. They are biosynthesized through intermediates of primary metabolism and often produced under specific environmental conditions or stress, where the expression of responsive genes is activated. Thus, to be sustainable the industrial production of microalgae required controlled environments. In response to this need, an innovative, pilot system was designed and manufactured. This novel automated system, can manage up to three photobioreactors of 3 L. The process is operated via a software tool developed in Python under the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm. The important variables are temperature, irradiance intensity, light-dark cycles, and pH, which are controlled and monitored. In the future, it is expected that this prototype can be scale-up and taken to an industrial level to provide support for increased culture production in less time.