Our society will need to move away from the strong dependence upon fossil fuels and to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases at the same time. Besides solar energy, wind energy, etc new sources of energy, bio energy or biofuel (e.g. Biodiesel or bioethanol) is being considered as one of the promising solutions to this problem. Biodiesel is produced by transesterification reaction of lipid and alcohol. Lipid suitable for producing biodiesel mainly comes from oil plant, oily yeast, and swill-cooked dirty oil. Compared to higher oil plants, microalgae have several advantages (e.g. on average relatively higher yield, higher oil content, meanwhile much less land use) which makes it important to model and optimize the process of microalgae production.

The most common ways to produc...[ Read more ]

Our society will need to move away from the strong dependence upon fossil fuels and to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases at the same time. Besides solar energy, wind energy, etc new sources of energy, bio energy or biofuel (e.g. Biodiesel or bioethanol) is being considered as one of the promising solutions to this problem. Biodiesel is produced by transesterification reaction of lipid and alcohol. Lipid suitable for producing biodiesel mainly comes from oil plant, oily yeast, and swill-cooked dirty oil. Compared to higher oil plants, microalgae have several advantages (e.g. on average relatively higher yield, higher oil content, meanwhile much less land use) which makes it important to model and optimize the process of microalgae production.

The most common ways to produce microalgae system are the open pond system and the tubular biophotoreactor (TBR) system. Yield of microalgae is mainly influenced by solar radiation, medium temperature, CO2 concentration, O2 concentration and nutrients. Temperature is very likely to be the main factor that affects the growth rate of microalgae, and also a major factor determining the productivity of an open system.

Mass and population of the microalgae growth is studied in this research. We have built models for open pond and PBR for predicting the mass yield of microalgae, also models for population growth and the composition of population analysis to optimize the cultivating process and design harvesting strategy.

The relationship between microalgae cluster growth rate curve and the mechanism of single microalgae cell formation is found.