Reinvigorating algal cultivation for biomass production with digital twin technology - a smart sustainable infrastructure

Industry 5.0 raises awareness towards converting conventional industrial technologies into smart technologies integrated with sustainable infrastructure for efficiently handling process systems, making them more energy and cost-efficient. New disruptive technologies are emerging due to recent scientific and technical developments, which profoundly affect various process systems. One such case of consideration is the algal cultivation for biomass production (ACB). A technology called an algal digital twin (ADT) has a great deal of promise to change existing ACB (For example raceway pond) into sustainable algal management systems (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Temperature, Turbidity, Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Carbon dioxide (CO₂), pH, Chlorophyll-a, etc.), and to develop their infrastructure in making them more energy efficient and cost-effective for the algal biomass cultivation. However, despite a recent increase in attention, there have not been adequate investigations exploring the challenges of deploying ADTs for controlling and monitoring ACB. This review provides a systematic literature analysis on adopting an ADT into ACB, which could address major difficulties and unresolved problems of the ACB. Also, this study identifies several key categories of hurdles, such as interconnection and semantics, facilities, acquiring data and actuation, data reliability, modelling (Artificial Intelligence of Things), simulation run, decision making, digitalization of data, accountability, as well as social concerns. Additionally, case studies for the ACB towards lipid production and wastewater treatment using ADT are reported. Overall, this comprehensive review aims to help practitioners gain insight into the deployment of ADT into ACB systems, “A way towards creating a sustainable smart infrastructure for ACB”.