These are four of the control panels for production fermenters at the National Cancer Institute's Fermentation Program at Frederick, MD. They each have analog controllers for temperature, RPM, sparge air, pH, and dissolved oxygen by RPM. Each fermenter is mounted on load cells to monitor weight. The values of these parameters are displayed by LEDs as well as on strip chart recorders. The signal output from the controllers are interfaced with a supervisory computer for data storage, analysis, and graphing (45, 68, 73, 136, 199, 226, 230, 255).
CEBTech can specify, purchase, and install process measurement and control instrumentation for many types of industrial processes. Much of the computer control has been done with software languages like Forth, Script, Rosemount RS3 RBL language, various types of Basic, C++, and Visual C++.
Bioprocess control routinely involves data acquisition, recording, graphing, data analysis, proportional control, proportional integral derivative (PID), time proportioning on/off, autotuning, process simulation, serial interface, parallel interface, RS-232, RS-422, RS-485 communications, isolated analog input, isolated analog output, and digital I/O.
In the center the operator is working at the Asyst Software Data Recording and Graphics terminal. On his right is the Fisher-Rosemount Operator Control Terminal and Interactive Graphics Screen. It is interfaced with much of the monitoring and control instrumentation in the Pilot Plant.
In the far corner is a quadrupole process mass spectrometer built by ABB Extrel that was installed and configured for fermentation exhaust gas monitoring. It has the capability of monitoring off-gas streams from 16 different bioreactors and analyzing the concentration of 16 different components simultaneously in each of these exhaust gas streams (10, 26, 73, 136, 195, 230, 258). ABB Extrel
Craig Bremmon
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