2019 Engineering Sustainable Development
Attached Algae Cultivation for Coupling Sustainable Biomass Production and Environment Remediation
Authors
Sungwhan Kim - Presenter, Sandia National Laboratories
Ryan Davis, Sandia National Laboratories
Eric Monroe, Sandia National Labs
Algae has always been playing critical role in humanity by being very bottom of the food chain as well as responsible for more than half of oxygen generation on earth, further now is considered one of the most captivating alternative energy resources to replace fossil fuel. Algae has the potential to be used not only in biofuel, but also in many other products such as food supplements, animal feed, bioplastics, and cosmetics. This inexhaustible potential of algae has continued to draw attention to itself in academia and industry. Especially, efforts on the development of attached algae cultivation have been proliferated since it significantly reduces harvest/dewatering cost and contamination risk, which were the biggest challenges that typical suspended cultivation system had have. In this talk, Sandia National Labsâ effort on attached algae cultivation for coupling sustainable biomass production and environment remediation will be discussed. Sandia has been deploying periphytic attached algae flow-ways, formerly known as Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS), at multiple contaminated location in US and running multiple years to see its sustainability in biomass productivity and ability to remove nutrients from contaminated source water. As a result, we were able to achieve consistent nutrient removal and biomass productivity without any crash for years at all our deployment locations. In addition, another type of attached cultivation technique, porous substrate-based attached cultivation will be introduced and its potential in algae-based high value product market will be discussed.