This has to be added to the inherent complexity of the biological systems. To cope with all these issues innovative, reliable, smart, and cost-effective manufacturing processes are demanded, but, to meet these requirements involves the education of new engineers and vocational training students with tools that take advantage of the application of novel information and communication technologies to education in biotechnology and bioprocesses.The use of computer simulations in the control process field to build models or to model real-world phenomena in order to help students gain insights into the behaviour of complex systems is of growing importance. Prominent advantages of virtual laboratories are not new [4�C6].

Interacting with a simulation in virtual laboratories enable learners to gain better understanding of real systems, processes or phenomena through exploration, testing of hypotheses, and discovering explanations for processes.In this context, the development of PBRs simulators tailored to the student profile is necessary. To date and to the authors’ knowledge, no virtual laboratory for a PBR system has been developed. For vocational training students or plant operators, the development of virtual laboratories to master the operation of a PBR more from a qualitative view that from a quantitative and engineering perspective is justified. For the control and chemical engineering student, PBR simulators are fundamental to appreciate the complexity of these multivariable biological processes.

The advantages of a PBR interactive simulator, such as the one described in this paper, are clear, either for students or from an industrial point of view. It provides opportunities for users to modify their mental models, by comparing the outputs of the model with their expectations, and also it engages or motivates students to explore different effects which will lead to understanding. From an industrial point of view, the necessity of more advanced simulations PBR environments is compulsory. Many design factors must be optimized and balanced to implement an algae growing system in a large commercial facility.The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the PBR system. Section 3 presents the real system overview. In Section 4 some environmental issues are shown. Section 5 presents the PBR system developed in Easy Java Simulations (EJS for short).

The paper ends with some concluding remarks and considerations about further works.2.?The Photobioreactor System2.1. Photobioreactor DesignMass cultivation of microalgae requires an appropriate culture system. There are different Cilengitide technical solutions for such cultivation [7,8]. Basically they can be classified in open PBR (known as raceways), which are open to the air, and closed PBR.2.1.1. Open SystemsThe benefits of open systems lie in the ease of construction.

Location tracking applications are based mainly on the principle of identifying the location of users and analyzing their behavior. One example of this kind of application is presented in work done by [11]. This system employs a WSN to obtain RSSI values, which, through an algorithm, can locate the location of users within their homes. ZUPS is also an application that centers on location tracking for aged and/or disabled people. This project uses a ZigBee network and ultrasound-positioning systems, which allows caregivers to not only locate individuals within a specified space, but to also provide assistance for persons moving from one place to another beyond the confines of their home [12].Medication intake applications consist mainly in monitoring the intake of the patient’s drugs.

iCabiNET provides a solution that employs a smart medicine manager that can notify patients via SMS or audio alarms at home to remind patients about their medications, as well as dosages and times [13]. Another medication intake application by the name of iPackage consists of medication wrappers with RFID tags which can be detected by an RFID sensor at the moment of ingestion, allowing caregivers to remotely monitor whether or not a patient is adhering to instructions [14].Finally, medical status monitoring collects clinical variables (i.e., heart rate, glucose monitoring, pulse, etc.), elaborates a current-state diagnosis of the patient and provides the information to caretakers. If any abnormality is detected, it can be immediately communicated to either family members or caretakers.

AlarmNet is an application that monitors a series of physiological variables, storing the data and processing the information to detect any abnormalities. If an abnormality is found, it notifies a mobile assistant [15]. Baby Glove is an application that monitors vital signs of newborn babies, such Dacomitinib as their body temperature. The data is gathered through the baby’s romper and then transmitted to a WSN, which constantly supervises important physiological variables and notifies caregivers if there is reading beyond the programmed limits in real time [16].Although there are many e-Health applications available today, this work focuses on developing a hybrid application that focuses on fall and movement detection and on medical status monitoring in a controlled environment, based on a WSN, to detect falls, tachycardia and bradycardia for the elderly population. To achieve this, this research focused on the use of an accelerometer and a heart rate sensor, connected to a previously developed mobile monitoring node to collect data and send it to the WSN Infrastructure, only when abnormal readings are detected.2.2.

This absorption spectrum allows the identification of the gas and, at the same time, contains information about its concentration. Hence, spectroscopic-based gas-sensing systems are attractive for gas detection as they provide high spectral resolution, gas selectivity, precise identification of gas species and possibility of remote measurements [3]. Furthermore, the ability to use optical fibre waveguides as gas cells in spectroscopic-based sensors opens up the possibility to very long interaction lengths with the gas, thus (assuming the transmission loss is low) to very high sensitivity. Moreover, fibres offer additional advantages such as compact size, light weight, very small volume samples, possibility of distributed measurements and better integrability in optical systems.

Until recently, systems based on conventional all-solid fibres showed a very poor performance [4]. In contrast, the advent of Hollow-Core Photonic Bandgap Fibres (HC-PBFs) has provided a more efficient platform to exploit the light-gas interaction [5].HC-PBFs are a new class of optical fibres in which light is guided by virtue of a periodic array of micro-sized holes, i.e. a microstructure, running down the full fibre length. Such array of holes gives rise to an optical bandgap, i.e. an interval of wavelengths or frequency range where light cannot propagate through the microstructure. When an oversized air hole is introduced in the centre of the microstructure, a defect is created allowing the propagation of light. This central air hole forms the core of the fibre where light is trapped by the photonic bandgap determined by the cladding [5, 6].

HC-PBFs have unique properties that make them particularly suitable for gas sensing. When the hollow core of the fibre is filled with gas, very long interaction lengths between light and the gas confined in the core can be achieved, enabling high sensitivity measurements. Furthermore, HC-PBFs are also interesting for their possibilities of integrability in optical systems and compactness. For the aforementioned reasons, in the past few years gas-filled HC-PBFs have been widely investigated in applications such as gas detection [7, 8], high-resolution spectroscopy experiments [9, 10], wavelength locking [11] and nonlinear-optics [12].The long pathlengths provided by HC-PBFs are particularly advantageous Dacomitinib for monitoring weakly absorbing gases.

Specifically, this work focuses on the detection of methane band ��2 + 2��3, at 1.3 ��m. This region is of great interest as it is used as a telecommunication band. Therefore, it benefits from the fully-developed and low-cost telecommunication light sources and detectors available in this wavelength range. However, due to the weakly absorbing lines of this band, it is very difficult to detect with conventional gas cells. Traditionally, bulky gas cells have been needed to reach a good sensitivity [13].