Brewing Internet of Things (BIoT)

Automated Brewing

Do you enjoy beer? What about process control, thermodynamics and kinetic modelling? Controlling this biological process to achieve the desired beer characteristics is challenging to this day. Large breweries have access to sophisticated devices for process control, but what about homebrewers and craft breweries who can’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-end equipment? The Brewing Internet of Things (BIoT) aims to design and implement low-cost data monitoring and develop innovative techniques to brew novel, high-quality beers through various projects.

Project

BIoT is a chemical and biological engineering design team encompassed by the student organization UBC Envision. The projects are based on the idea of ‘The Internet of Things’, and aims to develop craft brewing technologies to create an automated brewing system with the ability to monitor and control process variables such as temperature, acidity, gravity and possibly more in real-time. The team also pays attention to engineering multidisciplinary student development through practical applications while creating a meaningful and relevant product. The team will conduct the brewing process, collect data in the fermentation phase, provide quality control on the finished product, as well as analyze and model the data using an online web server. The students are able to apply what they learned in their classes, work on their teamwork skills while preparing their technical skills for industry. BioT’s short term goals are to develop our members' knowledge on the brewing world and establish an appreciation of how directly the brewing process relates to concepts learned in class. Our long term goals are to implement a small scale brewing laboratory that can operate autonomously and allow for simple, low cost data collection on an 'internet of things' basis. This data collection is going to be used to develop models and data clusters, to establish consistency within brew quality and eventually create and incorporate new brewing technologies into our bench scale setup. Through various projects, BioT’s long-goal is to optimize brewing processes for brewing technologies, to design and implement low-cost data monitoring, and in time, to have our research and technology introduced and applied to actual breweries to brew the perfect beer. The sub-team's learning goals will differ throughout the teams,although all sub-teams are working towards the same short and long term goals.

Project Details

2022/2023 Recruitment

Closed for the year! Please feel free to follow us on Instagram or Facebook and contact biot@ubcenvision.com if you have any questions!

Subteams

Brewing Team

The brewing team is responsible for designing the brews, maintaining the equipment, and brewing the beer. Everything must run smoothly for efficiency and the good quality of the product, as this process gets very complicated. The team uses the theory taught in CHBE courses (such as CHBE 220/221) to develop a bench scale brewery, develop methods to optimize the brewing process by analyzing products and intermediates during fermentation and create new recipes through research and determine the conditions needed for consistent product quality.

For the brewery team, the objective is to simulate a project in industry and to introduce fluid transfer, real pumps, electronics, and unit operations. These are essential for any chemical or mechanical engineer when working in industry

Instrumentation Team

The instrumentation team is responsible for programming temperature, pH, CO2, specific gravity and dissolved oxygen sensors to collect the data during the fermentation. The team also builds and designs analytical equipment to monitor and control the brewing process variables and builds upon a web app that allows a user to see key brewing parameters in real-time and warn users about outliers.

The instrumentation team will have goals more specific to electrical/computer and chemical engineering in the process control area. This means that they must understand how the programming/process control interface works, essential process control theory, and data collection through probes.

Laboratory Team

The lab team is responsible for testing the final product for quality control as a simulation of real world quality control processes. The team creates data clusters to develop models for brewing process data and uses laboratory equipment to test properties beyond the instrumentation team’s abilities.

The lab teams aims to capitalize the by-project of the Kombucha brewing process being the SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) through two projects: - Using it as a biomaterial which is safe and sustainable in the food wrapping industry - Genetically modified the bacterial cell from SCOBY to glow in the dark in which it put in the kombucha again to make glowing kombucha in the dark.