This paper addresses the development of pilot scale sustainable technology for microalgae capture of CO2 from power plant flue gas in alkaline solutions to produce biodiesel from algal oil. A combination of computer tools for process simulation, economic evaluation, and environmental impact allow sustainable process assessment. Laboratory scale experiments for growth and culture for algae in la...

Microalgae are promising sources for the sustainable production of compounds of interest for biotechnologies. Compared to higher plants, microalgae have a faster growth rate and can be grown in industrial photobioreactors. The microalgae biomass contains specific metabolites of high added value for biotechnology such as lipids, polysaccharides or carotenoid pigments. Studying carotenogenesis is...

Microalgae can serve as a carbon sink for CO2 sequestration and as a feedstock for liquid biofuel production. Methods for microalgal biomass and biofuel cultivation are progressing, but are still limited in the efficiency of light delivery and gas exchange within cultures. Specifically, current gas exchange methods are very energy intensive since they rely on mixing algal cultures at high flow ...

In the present work we identified and quantified the effect of hydrodynamic stress on two different microalgae strains, Dunaliella tertiolecta and D. salina, cultivated in bench-scale bubble columns. The cell death rate constant increased with increasing gas-entrance velocity at the sparger. Dunaliella salina was slightly more sensitive than D. tertiolecta. The critical gas-entrance velocities ...

The scalability of microalgae growth systems is a primary research topic in anticipation of the commercialization of microalgae-based biofuels. To date, there is little published data on the productivity of microalgae in growth systems that are scalable to commercially viable footprints. To inform the development of more detailed assessments of industrial-scale microalgae biofuel processes, thi...

Previous work from our laboratory demonstrated the feasibility of using sulfur-deprived algal cultures to photoproduce H2 continuously for 3-4 days (Melis et al., 2000; Ghirardi et al., 2000a). The production of H2 depends mostly on the photosynthetic H2O-oxidation activity of the cultures (Ghirardi et al., 2000 a and b; Kosourov et al., 2002), and requires concomitant operation of O2-consumpti...