Tubular photobioreactor design based on mixing intensity

Abstract

A novel design methodology for tubular photobioreactors (TPBRs) for the mass culture of microalgae that can account for mixing intensity is presented. To date, TPBRs have been mainly designed and operated under the assumption of perfect mixing with regard to photosynthesis performance (light integration regime). In this work we show that this simplification has been leads to significant errors in the prediction of the optimal dilution rate and biomass productivity. To this end, computational fluid dynamics and light distribution model have been employed to calculate the trajectories and light histories I(t) of a microalgal cell population represented by 50 particles of 5 μm diameter. The density of the microalgal cells was set at 1000 kg m⁻³ and the tube diameters (D) were 14, 24, 44, 64 and 84 mm, with the circulation velocities (v) ranging from 0.4 to 1 m s^-1. This has been coupled to a dynamic photosynthesis model in order to calculate the average photosynthetic response and hence the integration factors in TPBRs. It has been demonstrated that for a generic microalgal strain, the use of the light integration simplification (Γ = 1) would result in the prediction of an optimal dilution rate of 0.0315 h⁻¹ (for D = 14 mm and v = 0.4 m/s as an example), which would lead to an actual biomass productivity of 182.5 g biomass m⁻³h⁻¹ if the predicted integration factor (Γ = 0.578) is used whereas the newly proposed method predicts an optimal dilution rate of 0.0125 h⁻¹ and a biomass productivity of 362.3 g biomass m⁻³h⁻¹. This demonstrates that simplifying the light integration regime is inadequate for TPBRs design and operation, resulting in significant inaccuracies. The estimation charts and regressions proposed in this work to estimate actual integration factors will enable the development of an optimization method for TPBRs based on mixing intensity.