Design And Preliminary Test Of Microalgae Culture Experimental System Based On A New Concentric-tube Photobioreactor

Photobioreactor is an important part of microalgae energy recearch. Due to someof the disadvantage which reduce the efficiency of traditional photobioreactor, a newphotobioreactor should be designed to obtain efficient cultivation of microalgae andscale-up of photobioreactor. The main work of this paper is as follows:A concentric-tube photobioreactor was designed and fabricated. Compared withthe tubular photobioreactor, concentric-tube photobioreactor can increase the ratio oflight/dark zones to reducing the light attenuation caused by scale-up of diameter,increase the light/dark cycle frequency to close to or reach the conditions of efficientcultivation, and remove the length limit of a single continuous culture pipe caused bydissolved oxygen(DO), which will be an important advantage for scale-up of a singlecontinuous culture system.A microalgae culture experimental system consisting of liquid circulation system,gas circulation system, temperature control systems, data acquisition and controlsystem was designed and fabricated. Then a preliminary test was done. Theexperimental system was running well, and it can monitoring the environmentalparameters of microalgae growth online and control the temperature, gas flow rate,CO2concentration and light intensity, to ensure the unitary condition of microalgaeculture experiments and the accuracy of experimental data. The experimental systemcan be used to study the mechanism of the growth of microalgae, to simulatelarge-scale cultivation of microalgae, to optimize the environmental parameters oflarge-scale cultivation, to test the performance of a variety of photobioreactor, inparticular, to study the effect of carbon sequestration and the the ability to deal withindustrial emissions of microalgae.A concentric-tube photobioreactor system for large-scale microalgae cultivationwas designed. The system has advantages of saving power and carbon sequestration,the temperature control system is efficient, the data acquisition and control system isaccurate.This paper can provide an advanced experimental system for further experimentalstudy on microalgae cultivation and photobioreactors.