Monitoramento de baixo custo aplicado a processos biotecnológicos: estudo de caso da produção de cerveja artesanal

Abstract

It is common for universities and small businesses to find difficulties inacquiring laboratory equipment due to the high cost of purchasing and maintaining them. This leads to delays in research and development of new products. Financial resources that could be used to develop the research are allocated only for equipment acquisition and maintenance. On the other hand, advances in the area of electronics and computing, are bringing to the market more powerful equipment and sensors at increasingly affordable costs, such as the Arduino and Raspberry-Pi micro-controllers and solid-state gas sensors. The use of these advances in microelectronics in the automation and monitoring of biotechnological processes will allow the innovations developed in the university to arrive technically and economically viable to the market. This work studies the case of the application of low cost sensors to monitor the beer fermentation process, analyzing the feasibility and practicality of its use in other biotechnological processes.