From Microscopic Scale to Thousands Liters Industrial Plant: Biological Modeling of Unicellular Microorganism as a Tool to Improve Management of a Microalgae Production Plant

The production of microalgae represents a large and rapidly expanding market with several applications in the fields of food, pharmaceutics, cosmetics and energy. Microalgae are unicellular photosynthetic aquatic microorganism whose growth is strictly related through complex and non-linear relationship to a few environmental parameters. Among them, temperature, light, pH and nutrient availability are the most important in determining microalgae biomass production and its biochemical quality, which can influence also the nutritive value of the final product. For this reason, monitoring and control such parameters in production plant is crucial for the resulting production. At the same time, the development of mathematical models to simulate the behavior of biological systems has become a major predictive and control tool of production processes where detail of description have to deal with the available computing power and the ease of consulting.In this paper we present a biological model that could be the core of a Decision Support System (DSS) for the plant manager to monitor and control a Spirulina (Arthrospira platensis) production plant for the food industry. The DSS is based on a modeling tool that simulates and predicts the biological adaptation and response of microalgae to the variations of these parameters. In the present paper, we want to focus on a new modeling approach chosen to describe the complexity of unicellular biological mechanism focusing on the photo-physiological adaptations, which are influenced by the main factors that can be adjusted at the large scale of functioning of the microalgae production plant, conjugating the microscopic view to the very large-scale one.