Enhancing industrial microalgae production through Economic Model Predictive Control

The industrial production of microalgae is an important and sustainable process, but its actual competitiveness is closely related to its optimization. The biological nature of the process hinders this task, mainly due to the high nonlinearity of the process along with its changing nature, features that make its modeling, control and optimization remarkably challenging. This paper presents an economic optimization framework aiming to enhance the operation of such systems. An Economic Model Predictive Controller is proposed, centralizing the decision making and achieving the theoretical optimal operation. Different scenarios with changing climate conditions are presented, and a comparison with the typical, non-optimized industrial process operation is established. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can provide measurable economic improvements while maintaining stable process operation, highlighting the potential of optimization-based approaches for industrial microalgae production.