SBIR Phase I: Algae Cultivation Technology for Value Added Co-products from Waste Water Treatment Effluent

The broader impacts of this Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve reuse of wastewater. This project advances a new algae reactor to reduce biological nutrient pollution. This will improve health, potential loss of commercial fishing resources, water tourism, and property value decline.

The diversity of products that can be generated from algae cultivation improve the robustness of the global food chain and the security of domestic feedstocks, e.g. high nutrition feeds for livestock and aquaculture and a new source of chemicals and biofuels. The proposed design for maximum resource efficiency in water and energy enables value extraction from marginal lands.

The proposed project aims to reduce levels of biological nutrient pollutants in the effluent of wastewater treatment facilities—by the development of an industrial scale, algae photobioreactor, designed to operate in a high-volume, continuous flow process. Anticipated advantages of the new technology are a reduction in capital and operating expense compared to existing nutrient removal methods and the capacity to generate, high-purity, algae coproducts with commercial value.

Research objectives include the following: (1) create a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the reactor under various flow conditions; (2) perform dye tracer experiments in the reactor as validation of the modeling results; (3) install the reactor as part of an integrated nutrient removal system including ultrafiltration, product recycle stream, nutrient sensors and process feedback control; (4) evaluate the nutrient removal capabilities of the system using a live algae culture and effluent from an adjacent wastewater treatment facility; and (5) perform a technoeconomic analysis of the proposed process. Results of the project will provide a better understanding of the effect of reactor design and operating parameters on the hydraulic and solids residence time distributions, how these influence the waste removal performance of the system, and what design parameters exert the most control over economic feasibility.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.