Near infrared spectroscopy in bioreactor performance monitoring

This issue’s column reports on some recent work by a multi-disciplinary team quantifying the capability of near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in extensively and successfully getting to grips with the complex problem of optimising anaerobic digestion operation. To make their investigation more difficult they ruled out any sort of off-line or near-line pre-treatment of the samples and ran three bioreactors together to obtain data that could be used to see if the underlying data could be used to generate predictive and closed-loop control models that would be generally applicable rather than being restricted to the individual reactors