Towards Integration of CFD and Photosynthetic Reaction Kinetics in Modeling of Microalgae Culture Systems

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in photosynthetic microalgae, e.g., as a source of biofuels, the mass cultivation of microalgae still exhibits many drawbacks and successful industrial applications are scarce. Reliable model integrating all relevant phenomena and enabling to assess the system performance, its in silico scale-up and eventually optimization, is still lacking. Here, we present a unified modeling framework for microalgae culture system. We propose a multidisciplinary modeling framework to bridge biology (cell growth) and physics (hydrodynamics and optics) together. This framework consists of (i) the state system (mass balance equations in form of advection-diffusion-reaction PDEs), (ii) the fluid flow equations (Navier-Stokes equations), and (iii) the irradiance distribution. To validate the method, the Couette-Taylor reactor, which hydrodynamically induces the fluctuating light conditions, was chosen. The results of numerical simulation of microalgae growth in this device show good agreement with experimental data.