Preliminary project design for insect production: part 2 – organism kinetics, system dynamics and the role of modelling & simulation

Abstract

During preliminary project design (PPD) an entopreneur can investigate a variety of process types, organism/feed combinations, operating conditions and procedures, control approaches, etc. before deciding on a specific system arrangement and proceeding to a more formal design stage. With modelling and simulation the effort required to locate a high-value point within the overall possibility space for a system can be greatly reduced because much of the development work can be carried out in a virtual environment. Nevertheless, to formulate models of the organism/feed kinetics as well as other system aspects, this approach must be based on experimental data. And, of course, results of a simulation study must be verified empirically. A simulation-based approach to PPD allows an entopreneur to study the dynamics of a wide variety of system arrangements and to gain insight into how a given arrangement is likely to perform with different parameter values and disturbances.