Application of Optical Camera Communication to Microalgae Production Plants

Abstract

Optical Camera Communication (OCC) Systems have a potential application for monitoring flat-panel photobioreactors in microalgae production plants. On the transmitter side, the design of pulsed optical signals in terms of light intensity, spectral composition, and temporal variation is focused on optimizing the photosynthetic efficiency of the culture. At the reception, cameras are utilized for simultaneous online monitoring and in-situ sensing of the bioreactors culture. In this work, the analysis of the node arrangement in the plant has been carried out considering node visibility, data rate, and effective space utilization. Finally, a real experiment was performed to validate the application's feasibility.