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Updated: Mar 16, 2026
Microalgae Cultivation and Biomass Quantification in a Bench-Scale Photobioreactor with Corrosive Flue Gases
Published on: December 19, 2019
An annular photobioreactor with ion-exchange-membrane for non-touch microalgae cultivation with wastewater
Hai-Xing Chang1, Qian Fu1, Yun Huang1
1Key Laboratory of Low-grade Energy Utilization Technologies and Systems, Chongqing University, Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400030, China; Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, China.
Abstract:
To eliminate the negative impacts of pollutants in wastewater (such as suspended solids, excess N, P, heavy metals) on microalgae growth, an annular ion-exchange-membrane photobioreactor (IEM-PBR) was proposed in this study. The IEM-PBR could avoid direct mixing of algae cells with wastewater by separating them into two chambers. In the IEM-PBR, the nutrients (mainly N and P) in wastewater continuously permeated into microalgae cultures through the ion-exchange-membrane for microalgae growth, while the pollutants hardly permeated into microalgae cultures. Three types of representative wastewater were investigated to evaluate the performance of the IEM-PBR. When cultivated with wastewater containing excess nutrients, high turbidity and excess heavy metals, microalgae biomass concentrations were significantly improved from 2.34, 2.15 and 0gL(-1) in the traditional PBR to 4.24, 3.13 and 2.04gL(-1) in the IEM-PBR. Correspondingly, the removal efficiencies of N and P in wastewater were also greatly improved by using the IEM-PBR.
