Continuous pH sensor for beer fermentation monitoring

1. The assigning parties

https://www.Plaato.io/

Plaato is an international company, based in Oslo, Norway, developing and manufacturing systems for precision monitoring of the process of brewing beer. Piggybacking off the upswing in small-scale craft beer manufacturers, Plaato’s Plug-N-Play IoT devices and cloud solution has ensured an increased quality and turn-around for thousands of brewers. 

https://www.zimmerpeacock.com/

Zimmer & Peacock, as one of the leading companies in electrochemistry and bio sensors, sees that sensors are critical parts of the future social and commercial revolutions. With the strong base of sensor development, we are seeing our role in applied science and technology, including IoT, Sensor Web to growth sensors in medical application (in-vitro and in-vivo diagnostics market), rapid testing in the food and beverage industry, wearable biosensors, environmental tracking, etc. In the last six years ZP has been one of the biggest recruiters of students from USN, both from masters and PhD program. Starts your master project with us to join our high performance and diverse team.

2. The problem

Beer fermentation is the process in which sugar is converted into ethanol and carbon dioxide gas, catalyzed by the yeast [1]. The kinetics of biological catalysts, like yeast, tend to be very particular about the window of pH where they are the most facile [2]. In order to have a robust and effective fermentation, it is desirable to control this by additions of acids or bases. To know which kind of intervention to make, we need to measure the pH. With more knowledge, more measurements, we are better equipped to make better educated decisions. Continuous monitoring, as opposed to discrete sampling, offers great time resolution, no sample extraction, and measure the process in situ.

Electrochemical biosensors are becoming increasingly popular. A big stepping stone has been the success of blood glucose meters, and later continuous glucose sensors in closed-loop systems with an insulin pump, improving millions of lives by making Diabetes a manageable and non-lethal disease. Building off the architecture of these sensors, developers can essentially swap out the chemical recognition elements that gives the sensor its specificity, and target virtually any analyte. These sensors have spilled over into other fields than medicine, like food safety and quality, agriculture and aquaculture, personal safety, military and others [3].

The student will work on the functional and mechanical integration of Zimmer & Peacock’s electrochemical pH sensor into Plaato’s hardware architecture.

3. Tasks

The main tasks of the project are defined below. The student can decide which of these to emphasize, and which to play down. There student is free to modify anything of the below, as long as the main objective is fulfilled.

• Literature search
• Modelling
• Design
• Fabrication
• Characterisation
• Validation
• Integration

4. Outcomes

The student will learn to independently conduct a practical research project. The student will get a fundamental understanding of electrochemical biosensors, their theory and applications.  In return, the company will gain valuable insight into the specific application, and a broader service portfolio.

The most critical step in the beer brewing process is the fermentation.

5. Supervisor team

Plaato

ZP

6. References

Table 2  References