BACKGROUND Microalgae are a potential source of sustainable commodities of fuels, chemicals and food and feed additives. The current high production costs, as a result of the low areal productivities, limit the application of microalgae in industry. A first step is determining how the different production system designs relate to each other under identical climate conditions. The productivity a...

Citation: Marsullo M, Mian A, Ensinas AV, Manente G, Lazzaretto A and Marechal F (2015) Dynamic modeling of the microalgae cultivation phase for energy production in open raceway ponds and flat panel photobioreactors. Front. Energy Res. 3:41. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2015.00041 Dynamic modeling of the microalgae cultivation phase for energy production in open raceway ponds and flat panel photobioreac...

Solar radiation is the energy source driving the metabolic activity of microorganisms able to photobiologically fixate carbon dioxide and convert solar energy into biofuels. Thus, careful radiation transfer analysis must be conducted in order to design and operate efficient photobioreactors. This review paper first introduces light harvesting mechanisms used by microorganisms as well as photosy...

Twenty years of Italian outdoor investigations on closed photobioreactors are discussed in this review. Many photobioreactor designs have been projected; some have been built, tested and patented. The Italian research approach from tubular (single tube and traditional loop) to flat and column and again to tubular photobioreactors (coil and loops) has improved microalgal yield. It increased from...

Because algal cells are so efficient at absorbing incoming light energy, providing more light energy to photobioreactors would simply decrease energy conversion efficiency. Furthermore, the algal biomass productivity in photobioreactor is always proportional to the total photosynthetic rate. In order to optimize the productivity of algal photobioreactors (PBRs), the oxygen production rate shoul...

Abstract Photobioreactors are used to produce microalgae biomass for many purposes in industries and agriculture. This research was aimed at investigating alternative source of nutrients with lower cost a sustainable production photobioreactor system other than using F2 nutrient medium, the most commonly microalga compositions laboratories. Firstly, two sources were cultivate Chlorella sp. labo...

Photobioreactors simulation is currently the subject of scientific research in many countries due to interest in biofuel production. One challenge in the assessment of photobioreactors behavior is the lack of information about algae growth properties. In this paper, a dimensionless mathematical model is introduced for assessing the transient microalgae growth, O2, CO2 concentrations and tempera...

The current study proposes a simple monodimensional model to estimate the linear growth rate of photosynthetic microorganisms in flat-plate photobioreactors (FPPBRs) during batch cultivation. As a model microorganism, Chlorella kessleri was cultivated photoautotrophically in FPPBRs using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the light sources to provide unidirectional irradiation in the photobioreact...