Identification of the growth model parameters for a culture of Chlorella vulgaris in a photobioreactor

The microalgae biotechnology is a very promising solution for environmental applications. In particular, these photosynthetic microorganisms have a great capacity to fix the carbon dioxide converting it into biomass and other secondary metabolites. Therefore the biological CO2 fixation by microalgae has attracted much attention. The optimization of this biological process by maintaining the algal culture under optimal growth conditions represents a major challenge. Thus microalgae growth models are needed to optimize the carbon dioxide consumption by microalgae in engineered systems such as photobioteactors. In this paper, a procedure to identify parameters of a microalgae growth model is described. First of all, experiments carried out in a lab-scale photobioreactor are presented. Thereafter, a description of the selected growth model, applied to cultures of Chlorella vulgaris, which allows the effective representation of the evolution of the specific growth rate and biomass of the Chlorella vulgaris culture in a perfectly stirred photobioreactor is described. At last, results of our model are compared to experimental data, which confirms the accuracy of the whole procedure.