Design of algal film photobioreactors: Material surface energy effects on algal film productivity, colonization and lipid content

Factors affecting algae biofilm growth and lipid production: A review

“…Of the algal biofilm biofuel research conducted to date, many researchers have focused on the affects of growth materials on biofilm attachment and biomass accumulation [14,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], and on novel reactor designs and the biomass and lipid productivities they can produce [14,17,18,20,21,[24][25][26][27][28][29]. Additionally, there has been some work on how different growth parameters e.g.…”

“…Of the work that has been done on algae biofilms for biofuel production, much of it revolves around the study of the attachment, and subsequent growth, of algae biofilms to various growth materials [14,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. There has also recently been a significant amount of algae biofilm research on novel reactor designs studying biomass and lipid production rates [14,[17][18]20,21,[24][25][26][27][28][29]. Other studies on algae biofilms have related not specifically to biofuel and bioproduct production, but rather, on using them to treat wastewaters of nitrogen and phosphorus using algal turf scrubbers and novel biofilm growth systems [5][6][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

Biotechnological potential of an isolated and a known green microalgal strain and their cultivation in biofilm based reactors

“…Within this group, we can differentiate two other types depending on whether the medium has direct contact with the biofilm or not. In one case, the medium flows on the surface of the biofilm [50][51][52][53][54], while in the other case the biofilm is separated from the medium by a porous membrane [55][56][57][58][59][60]. The first case is a simpler setup, requiring only one substrate material, while the second one besides the porous membrane, another material is required which supports the porous membrane with the biofilm and leads the liquid through the system.…”

“…Surface charge of cells and the surface, the contact angles of materials (tested with different standard liquids) and surface energy were determined to examine whether they correlate with cell growth and biofilm formation [51,53,[69][70][71].…”

“…Nonetheless as Genin et al [51] proposed and Schnurr & Allen [72] summarized, algae biofilm formation can be separated into two phases: 1. the adhesion of the first cell layer and 2. the further growth of the biomass; of which only the first phase is influenced by the surface characteristics of cells and substrate. Due to the low sample number and low biomass yield, we could not examine this phenomenon in our experiments; however in the laboratory scaled Algadisk system, a similar tendency was observed (See Section 4.1.4).…”