Microalgae have enormous potential: capturing carbon, producing renewable raw materials, and enabling new sustainable products across multiple industries. But scaling algae cultivation from promising research to industrial reality requires one critical capability: robust systems that can be monitored and controlled in real time.
That is exactly what the ROBA (Robust Algae Systems) project set out to advance. Funded through Business Finland Co-Research, ROBA brought together research organizations and industry partners to strengthen algae cultivation systems so that by 2030 microalgae can contribute substantially to carbon capture and scalable bio-based value chains.
ROBA was structured around four work packages, with the core development work focusing on key areas that support industrial-scale feasibility.
1) Photobioreactor design for improved carbon fixation
The project evaluated photobioreactor designs and parameters to improve CO₂ capture and productivity — including factors such as CO₂ concentration, bubble size and sparging area.
2) Online monitoring to detect contamination and process disturbances
A major industrial bottleneck is that algae cultivation requires functional and reliable monitoring methods, which are still missing today. ROBA addressed this gap by developing online monitoring approaches and recovery strategies for large-scale algae cultures.
3) End-use applications, sustainability and market readiness
ROBA also evaluated algae biomass composition and explored regulation, consumer perception, and techno-economic sustainability, helping connect technical development with commercial reality.
Across bioprocessing industries, one truth remains constant: you can’t scale what you can’t measure. In algae cultivation, delayed feedback and insufficient monitoring make it harder to detect deviations early, recover from disturbances, and maintain stable performance at scale.
The ROBA report highlights the need to develop better process monitoring methods for algae cultivation and improved recovery strategies from near-crash situations.
This is where time-gated Raman spectroscopy becomes highly relevant. In the ROBA final report, a direct comparison between CW Raman and time-gated Raman shows that while both methods capture variation between samples, the change in biomass level becomes clearly evident only in the time-gated data. The report notes that changes in peak height at 1159 cm⁻¹ and 1524 cm⁻¹ are proportional to biomass concentration in the time-gated spectrum, whereas a similarly clear change cannot be detected in the conventional Raman data.
Timegate participated in ROBA as part of the project’s monitoring and sensor ecosystem. Timegate develops time-gated Raman spectroscopy, a technology that broadens Raman’s applicability to environments where fluorescence or thermal interference has traditionally limited successful Raman analyses.
The ROBA project demonstrated that creating scalable algae cultivation systems is not only a reactor design challenge, but also a monitoring and stability challenge. Better online insight is essential for detecting disturbances early, supporting recovery, and enabling reliable performance at industrial scale.
We are proud to contribute to this direction by enabling Raman analysis in environments where conventional Raman has struggled and by supporting the future of real-time, data-driven bioprocess monitoring.