Design Of Photobioreactor

The cultivation of microalgae within a controlled condition allows the production of biomass with lower contamination and suitable for high value pharmaceutical products. The controlled environment for microalgae growing can be accomplished by utilizing photobioreactor as a medium for introducing the basic needs needed by microalgae to do photosynthesis and to grow efficiently. However, due to some problems of high cost, low illumination and complicated harvesting systems which regarding available photobioreactors had contribute to low usage of photobioreactor in biomass production. This study deals with designing a new lab scale photobioreactor for overcoming the problems contributed by the available photobioreactors. During the developing process of the photobioreactor, customer needs are identified and the most suitable concept based on the customer needs is generated. The concept is then fabricated to prototype and its performances are monitored for five days by cultivating microalgae culture that collected from an abandon pond located in Penang, Malaysia. The microalgae culture changed colour from light green to darker green after have been cultivated for five days. The harvesting process then followed which resulted in trapping of most microalgae biomass on meshes used. These positive performances for growing and harvesting process of microalgae have been shown from the used of the lab scale of photobioreactor prototype which having high operating volume of 13.5 litres, utilizing the artificial lights from red light emitting diodes (LEDs), utilizing air bubbles for mixing process and implementing filtration process that having meshes with pore sizes range from 38.7 μm to 423 μm. The study shows that generating new concept which considering about customer needs and problems in available photobioreactor is important for producing good and optimum lab scale of photobioreactor