In food industries, fermentation is a largely used process, which involve microorganism such as bacteria and yeast, for the production of various products like alcohol, beers or enzymes. Controlling these fermentation processes require time-consuming analysis in the lab. The project goal is to develop a portable laboratory that can be directly connected to a bioreactor and to the cloud to allow an online follow-up of the fermentation process with a continuous data collection.
To simplify the data collection, we are developing an innovative sensor capable to quickly analyse key parameters of the process and convert them in electric signal usable for inline analysis. This portable laboratory will help food industries to drastically improve the control and understanding of the enzyme productions.
Thanks to the Exploration Voucher from S3Food and Wagralim, we validated, in collaboration with Valérie Dorgeo and Frédéric Roulling from Puratos, the working principle of this new compact sensor and the possibility to measure the enzymatic concentration with a short respond time could be shown. It take less than 2 minuts to get a significant signal in the presence of enzymes while no signal is observed in the reference solution. This is an important result for our final goal of the project : connect this portable laboratory directly to a bioreactor.
Portable laboratory for fast fermentation control