(460e) Reaction Engineering of Rearing and Conversion of Algae to Fuel Precursors

Microalgae hold much promise as a biomass from which fuels and chemicals can be produced because they can photochemically upgrade waste streams to energy-rich, functionalized molecules. However, the kinetics of their growth and the engineering of their harvesting and conversion are still far from economic. The conventional path--grow a monoculture of algae engineered to be rich in triacylglycerides and transesterify the glycerides to make biodiesel (fatty acid methyl esters)--appears to us to be neither practicable or nor immediately profitable. Instead, this presentation will discuss an approach that exploits the services provided by ecological communities of algae for stimulating growth and facilitating harvesting the algae as well as a robust conversion step, namely pyroslysis, that appears to offer better access to the energy content of the biomass while melding well with the existing petrofuel and petrochemccal infrastructure.

The thermochemical conversion process should be susceptible to NetGen-like modeling and simulation, the operation of the helioreactor requires at this point a more empirical approach, which accounts for energy and mass transfer within and between the cells.