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Automated Gas Fermentation for Sustainable Protein and Crop Nutrition
String Bio implemented ABB advanced process control to scale Asia's first methane-based gas fermentation facility, ensuring continuous yields and rapid market delivery.
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Application Areas: Gas Fermentation, Sustainable Protein Production, Agritech, Bioprocess Automation
Industry Sectors: Biotechnology, Agriculture and Crop Nutrition, Animal and Human Nutrition
String Bio, a biotechnology enterprise based in Bengaluru, India, develops alternative nutrition solutions by converting methane gas into biological products for plant, animal, and human consumption. With agriculture contributing approximately 40% of global human-caused methane emissions alongside surging nutritional demand, the company targets circular biological alternatives to traditional agricultural inputs.
Biological gas fermentation involves feeding natural microbes with methane within custom-engineered bioreactors. Because gas-to-protein conversion is highly sensitive to fluctuating biological and physical dynamics, manual operation introduces yield variations, batch instability, and operational safety risks. Scaling this platform from laboratory prototypes to Asia's first commercial-scale continuous gas fermentation plant required deterministic control over complex, continuous 24/7 reaction kinetics and integrated downstream operations. String Bio selected ABB to engineer an end-to-end automation foundation to manage this bioprocess.
Continuous Process Automation and Reaction Control
The production platform runs on an ABB advanced distributed control system designed to automate the complete sequence from microbial inoculation to post-fermentation downstream processing.
The control system executes real-time regulation over critical bioprocess parameters:
- Inoculation and Reaction Integrity: Controls the introduction of natural microbes into the fermentation vessel and maintains optimal microbial growing conditions.
- Continuous Operations: Manages multi-stage continuous processing around the clock with minimal manual intervention to drive uniform volumetric productivity.
- Downstream Integration: Coordinates mechanical and thermal operations downstream until final harvesting and product packaging stages.
This tight operational control underpins the commercial deployment of String Bio's agricultural and nutritional portfolios:
- CleanRise®: An agricultural product formulated to elevate rice yields by up to 40% while mitigating methane output from paddy fields by up to 50%.
- Sustain: An alternative protein ingredient manufactured with significantly reduced requirements for arable land, freshwater, and carbon footprint compared to conventional sources.
Process Data Acquisition and Optimization Roadmap
The installation provides end-to-end hardware connectivity, linking field instrumentation and processing units to the central ABB control architecture. The network logs every operational variable continuously, compiling real-time telemetry into auditable data sets for regulatory conformance, batch genealogy, and process planning.
Operators monitor and adjust active bioprocess variables via central supervisory interfaces to prevent process upsets and maintain uninterrupted cell growth. Drawing from the terabytes of operational bioprocess data captured across runtime cycles, String Bio is preparing to implement AI-driven predictive analytics within the control architecture to further optimize energy usage, feed rates, and overall fermentation yield.
Edited by Romila DSilva, Induportals Editor, with AI assistance.
The installation provides end-to-end hardware connectivity, linking field instrumentation and processing units to the central ABB control architecture. The network logs every operational variable continuously, compiling real-time telemetry into auditable data sets for regulatory conformance, batch genealogy, and process planning.
Operators monitor and adjust active bioprocess variables via central supervisory interfaces to prevent process upsets and maintain uninterrupted cell growth. Drawing from the terabytes of operational bioprocess data captured across runtime cycles, String Bio is preparing to implement AI-driven predictive analytics within the control architecture to further optimize energy usage, feed rates, and overall fermentation yield.
Edited by Romila DSilva, Induportals Editor, with AI assistance.
