A lumped parameter chemical-physical model for tubular photobioreactors

This work presents a dynamic lumped parameter model for microalgal production in tubular photobioreactors. The model is made up of fluid-dynamic processes, mass transfers and biological phenomena, all of them being based on chemical, physical, and biological principles. The aim of this work is to develop a simplified model including the main non-linear dynamics of the process, so that a trade-off between complexity and performance can be found. The model can be used for advanced control purposes, as a tool for the design and operation optimization of photobioreactors, or even as a supervision system of unmeasured variables. The characteristic parameters of the model were calibrated and validated under different conditions of solar radiation, using experimental data from a pilot facility consisting in an outdoor tubular photobioreactor. Furthermore, the proposed model is compared to other existing models (linear, distributed parameters and NARMAX) through a set of detailed simulations.