Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

Biomanufacturing Proposal

cover image cover image

1. What I would like to biomanufacture and why

I want to biomanufacture custom-grown mycelium acoustic panels for concert halls, studios, and public buildings. The target product is a lightweight, shaped, sound-absorbing panel made from agricultural waste bound by fungal mycelium. The panel can be grown into custom geometries such as diffusers, clouds, and wall tiles, and then heat-treated to stop fungal growth.

I am interested in this because construction materials are often energy-intensive, petrochemical-based, or non-biodegradable. Mycelium composites can use agricultural byproducts, grow at room temperature, store carbon in the material, and be composted at end of life. For a concert hall, acoustic performance is critical; custom shapes can be grown rather than machined. The product is for architects, acoustic designers, and building occupants. It connects biology, design, and sustainability in a way that I find interesting and important.

2. What living system would I use?

Chassis: white-rot fungus such as Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom) mycelium. It is a eukaryotic filamentous fungus that grows on lignocellulosic waste.

Inputs:

  • Agricultural waste substrate: hemp hurd, straw, sawdust, or corn stover.
  • Fungal spawn (mycelium on grain or sawdust).
  • Water.
  • Optional natural binders or fire retardants such as clay or borax, if needed.

Process:

  1. Pasteurize or sterilize the substrate.
  2. Mix substrate with spawn and water.
  3. Fill molds or trays shaped like the desired panel.
  4. Incubate at about 25–30 °C for 2–4 weeks; fungal hyphae colonize and bind the substrate.
  5. Remove from mold, dry, and heat-treat at about 70–80 °C to kill the fungus and prevent spores.
  6. Finish or cut for acoustic mounting.

Output: a solid, porous, mycelium-bound composite panel.

Assumptions: the fungus is non-pathogenic, growth is contained, and the final material can meet fire and acoustic codes after testing.

3. How would I use automation?

I would combine the living system with automated environmental control and robotic handling, plus a desktop liquid-handling robot such as an Opentrons for R&D.

  • R&D automation: Use an Opentrons or a programmable microfluidics platform to screen substrate formulations, spawn ratios, nutrient supplements, and fungal strains in 24- or 96-well or small tray formats. This would automate inoculation, sampling, and measurement of growth rate, density, and contamination.
  • Manufacturing automation: Use automated mixing and filling stations, a robotic gantry or conveyor to move trays into climate-controlled incubation rooms, and sensors for temperature, humidity, CO₂, and moisture. Robotic harvesting and drying lines would reduce labor and contamination.
  • Why: mycelium growth is slow and sensitive to environment. Automation can maintain reproducible conditions, run many parallel batches, and optimize formulations faster than manual trials.

4. How much would I need to make, and how long would it take?

(a) How much?

Scale: acoustic treatment for one medium concert hall.

Assumptions:

  • Acoustic panel area needed: 1,000 m² (walls, ceiling clouds, diffusers).
  • Panel thickness: 0.05 m (5 cm).
  • Mycelium composite density: 200 kg/m³. This is an assumption based on typical low-density mycelium composites, which often range around 100–300 kg/m³. Verify with literature before final submission.

Calculation:

  • Volume = 1,000 m² × 0.05 m = 50 m³.
  • Mass = 50 m³ × 200 kg/m³ = 10,000 kg = 10 metric tons of finished panels.

Substrate and spawn:

  • Assume finished panel is about 90% substrate and 10% fungal biomass/binder by dry mass. So dry substrate ≈ 9,000 kg.
  • Spawn rate: 10% w/w of dry substrate = 900 kg spawn.
  • Water: substrate is mixed at about 65% moisture. Wet mass ≈ 9,000 / (1 - 0.65) ≈ 25,700 kg wet mixture. So about 26 tons of wet material to fill molds.

So the meaningful scale is roughly 10 tons of finished panels, requiring about 9 tons dry substrate, 0.9 ton spawn, and 26 tons wet mixture.

(b) How long?

Assumptions:

  • Each panel is 1 m² × 0.05 m and weighs about 10 kg. Need 1,000 panels.
  • Incubation/colonization time: 21 days (3 weeks).
  • Preparation, filling, harvest, drying, finishing: 7 days.
  • Facility has 200 tray slots in parallel (small pilot factory).

If 200 panels grow in parallel:

  • Batches = 1,000 / 200 = 5 batches.
  • Time = 5 batches × 3 weeks = 15 weeks of incubation.
  • Add 1 week preparation/finishing = about 16 weeks.
  • With 1,000 parallel trays, time would be about 3 weeks incubation + 1 week = about 4 weeks.

Automation throughput:

  • Opentrons for R&D: can screen about 96 formulations per run, several runs per week.
  • Manufacturing: an automated filling line can fill about 200 trays/day; a robotic gantry can move trays continuously. The bottleneck is biological growth time, not liquid handling.
  • At scale, a factory with 1,000+ trays and automated climate control could produce about 10 tons per month.

5. What don’t I know yet?

  1. Material performance: Will mycelium panels meet acoustic absorption coefficients, fire safety, moisture resistance, and mechanical strength required for a concert hall? I would need to measure impedance tube absorption, flame spread, and compressive strength.
  2. Contamination and reproducibility: How stable is P. ostreatus growth at 10-ton scale? I would need to test contamination rates, sterilization/pasteurization methods, and batch-to-batch variability.
  3. Scale-up economics: What is the actual yield, drying energy, labor, and cost per m² compared with conventional acoustic panels? I would need a pilot production run and techno-economic analysis.

References

  • Asin-Garcia, E., et al. (2025). A snapshot of biomanufacturing and the need for enabling research infrastructure. Trends in Biotechnology, 43(5), 1000–1014.
  • Petzold, C. J., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2025). From bench to biofactory: High-throughput technologies and automated workflows to accelerate biomanufacturing. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 94, 103320.
  • Yap, W. S., Choudhury, D., & Suntornnond, R. (2023). Towards biomanufacturing of cultured meat. Trends in Biotechnology, 41(3), 292–294. Used as general biomanufacturing context.
  • Additional assumptions from general mycelium composite literature; verify density and acoustic values before final submission.