Keywords
Chlorella vulgaris
Microalgae
Biomass
NPK nutrients
How to Cite
Abstract
Airlift reactors are widely used in the chemical and biochemical applications as effective contactors for mass and heat transfer. The main advantages of airlift contactor compared with simple bubble column are ease of construction, low shear rate, high capacity, good mixing and liquid circulation without mechanical agitators and circulating pumps.
In this work, growth characteristics of Chlorella vulgaris microalgae were studied in an internal loop airlift photobioreactor for biomass production. The bioreactor operated under batch and semi-continuous culture mode using commercially available 20:20:20+TE NPK fertilizer as nutrients. The experiments were conducted to evaluate the growth rate and biomass productivity of Chlorella vulgaris microalgae as affected by several factors such as nutrients concentration (20-80 mg/L), inlet air flow rate (2-8 LPM), and harvesting ratio (10-30 vol.%). The growth rate and biomass productivity of Chlorella vulgaris was determined as changes in optical density using UV-spectrophotometer. The results of batch operation showed that the growth rate of Chlorella vulgaris microalgae was increase with increasing of NPK nutrient concentration used but the access to the stationary phase of growth was delayed. The rate of growth was also increase with the increase in air flowrate to a limit then decrease. On the other hand the airlift photobioreactor can be operated in semi- continuous mode successfully by choosing the optimum conditions from the batch step which was 40 mg/L NPK nutrients concentration and 6 LPM and air flowrate. Several ratios of reactor content were harvested and the maximum biomass productivity was 0.142 g/L.day when harvested 10 vol.% every two days.
Copyright: Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations. While the advice and information in this journal are believed to be true and accurate on the date of its going to press, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.