Alwyn V. Husselmann and Ken A. Hawick
Control agents, Bioreactor, Cultivation, Simulation
Photobioreactors offer an efficient and controllable environment from which many biomaterial-based products can be manufactured naturally. For example, the cultivation of the algae H. pluvialis, results in a carotenoid known as Astaxanthin, which is a highly valuable pigment and powerful antioxidant. The demand for naturally-produced Astaxanthin is much higher than synthetic, and the process by which this algae is cultivated is therefore important. We develop a discrete agent-based model that can be used to test the control processes for growing and harvesting such a bio product. We experiment with a variant of the Photosynthetic Factory model to improve cell division and hence growth kinetics. We employ parallel computing techniques to implement simulations of large numbers of control agents on graphical processing units. We discuss the implications of stochasticity, and propose a metric with which to balance cultivation time against fill rates of a stochastic data-parallel, bubble-column photobioreactor simulation.
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