Novel photobioreactor design for the culture of Dunaliella tertiolecta – Impact of color in the growth of microalgae

•Microalgae grow in different ways in front of different lighting colors.•Lighting colors encourage the production of high value pigments in microalgae.•The behavior of microalgae is similar in different control volumes.•Irradiance models can explain the preference of microalgae over certain colors.•Irradiance transfer should be considered to scale up the photobioreactor. Microalgae are affected by the amount of light received. This parameter can be controlled by changing the light source and altering the reactor used for their growth. In this study, the effect of different colors of light was analyzed in the growth of Dunaliella tertiolecta, observing that blue lighting systems reached a biomass 10 times superior to the one generated by orange lightning systems. This growth effect was seen in a novel tubular internally illuminated photobioreactor. In this photobioreactor, the blue reactor produced 1.7 times the biomass of the red reactor, with the particularity that the latter showed an oscillating behavior in its growth. From irradiance models, the light dispersion coefficient is higher than the absorption coefficient when using red light. In contrast, with blue light, the value of the scattering coefficient is almost null.