CO2 mass transfer and conversion to biomass in a horizontal gas–liquid photobioreactor

• The CO2 conversion to biomass efficiency is modelled.
• The influence of gas stripping is shown to be not negligible.
• Effects of design and operating parameters are investigated.

This study deals with CO2 mass transfers and biomass conversion in an industrial horizontal tubular photobioreactor. An analytical approach is used to determine an expression modeling the influence of CO2 mass transfers on the overall biomass conversion efficiency for a given culture broth, heat and light conditions. Fluid mechanics and mass transfer are predicted with a classical two-phase flow approach (Taitel and Dukler, 1976) combined with a dissolution correlation developed and tested in the laboratory (Valiorgue et al., 2011). The influence of the stripping gas, removing the excess of oxygen in the liquid, on the conversion to biomass efficiency is shown to be not negligible. The expression is used to evaluate how the photobioreactor's design and process parameters can be tuned in order to improve biomass conversion efficiency. The biomass conversion efficiency evolution with the photobioreactor's length was found to behave asymptotically and it was explained by the relative orders of magnitude of gas dissolution and gas stripping. It has been shown that the gas flow rate for stripping and therefore the oxygen removal will be limited when further increasing the industrial photobioreactor's length for a given objective of CO2 conversion to biomass efficiency.