For final project, I’m building a micro-brewery with continuous flow!

project scope

I’m recently into home-brewed beer and want to do more experimentation. However, monitoring reaction conditions and ingredient amounts is very labor-intensive. I am building an integrated micro-brewery that can automate ingredient transfer, product transfer, reaction condition monitoring, and experiment logging.

Such micro-brewery takes the form of bioreactors, which are vessels that convert feedstock (usually some types of sugar) to alcohol (usually ethanol). I take inspiration from this open-source microbial bioreactor and this digitally fabricated spirulina farm.

plan

First I sorted out all components and things I want to be able to monitor in this workflow.

Then I chatted with Nadya and Junchao to consolidate the timeline and hopefully this project will grow into something bigger! But realistically, within the timeframe of this quarter, I wish to have a digitally fabricated compartmentalized prototype.

So far I have planned a few layers to hold my sensors, motors, microcontroller, etc.

Eventually, the cap could be either round to fit the glass jar acting as a carboy or square to have slightly larger space.

contingency

Having a functional micro-brewery might be a stretched goal. My contingency plan would be to have at least digitally designed and fabricated cases for selected motors, sensors, and microcontroller.

All files:

Rhino file