Optimizing Photobioreactor Design

Enclosed systems alleviate the challenges associated with pathogens and predators allow for tighter controls on parameters such as media component concentrations, light intensity, and temperature and are ideal for transgenic strains that may pose an environmental threat if they escape into the environment. However, they are much more expensive to build and maintain than open ponds, so these systems are more suitable for high-value products like therapeutics or nutritional supplements. 

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In summary, an optimal H2-photoproducing biological system would have to be able to function at high rates and with about 10% solar light conversion efficiency in an aerobic atmosphere, simultaneously evolving H2 and O2 gases at a ratio of 2 1. Materials and gas separation issues, as well as photobioreactor designs to address these, will be discussed in section 5.3. 

Therefore, available computer graphics tools allow us to simulate any geometric structure of a photobioreactor with the same Monte Carlo algorithm and with acceptable calculation time. This recent advance in the field of the Monte Carlo method opens up interesting perspectives on photobioreactor design, for example, in relation to the optimization algorithm. 

When a Monte Carlo algorithm is used for estimation of any physical quantity B), a simple and fast additional procedure can be implemented that simultaneously estimates sensitivity of B to any parameter (Delatorre et al., 2014). This practically means that when Monte Carlo code is available that computes B, only a few additional lines of code are needed so that partial derivatives of B are also computed with respect to all the parameters ofinter-est. We are interested either in physical analysis (how does B evolve when a parameter is modified ) or in optimal design (what is the optimal value of the parameter for a target value of E ). A general overview of sensitivity estimation is available in Delatorre et al. (2014). This methodology was implemented in Dauchet et al. (2013) and Delatorre et al. (2014) to evaluate sensitivity of the radiation field within a DiCoFluV photobioreactor (see... 

Cornet JP Calculation of optimal design and ideal productivities of volumetricaUy lightened photobioreactors using the constructal approach, Chem Eng Sd... 

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