Dynamic modelling of high biomass density cultivation and biohydrogen production in different scales of flat plate photobioreactors

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the scaling‐up of cyanobacterial biomass cultivation and biohydrogen production from laboratory to industrial scale. Two main aspects are investigated and presented, which to the best of our knowledge have never been addressed, namely the construction of an accurate dynamic model to simulate cyanobacterial photo‐heterotrophic growth and biohydrogen production and the prediction of the maximum biomass and hydrogen production in different scales of photobioreactors. To achieve the current goals, experimental data obtained from a laboratory experimental setup are fitted by a dynamic model. Based on the current model, two key original findings are made in this work. First, it is found that selecting low‐chlorophyll mutants is an efficient way to increase both biomass concentration and hydrogen production particularly in a large scale photobioreactor. Second, the current work proposes that the width of industrial scale photobioreactors should not exceed 0.20 m for biomass cultivation and 0.05 m for biohydrogen production, as severe light attenuation can be induced in the reactor beyond this threshold. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2015;112: 2429–2438. © 2015 The Authors. Biotechnology and Bioengineering Published by Wiley Peiodicals, Inc. A dynamic model was constructed to simulate cyanobacterial (Cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142) photo‐heterotrophic growth and biohydrogen production; a stable dynamic parameter estimation methodology was applied to guarantee the model accuracy. The model was used to estimate cyanobacterial growth and hydrogen production in different scales of flat‐plate photobioreactors. It is found that the efficient strategy to increase hydrogen production in laboratory scale processes is to seek the optimal operating conditions, while that in large scale processes is to select low‐chlorophyll mutants.