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अमूर्त

Operational Strategies for Lab scale Horizontal Tubular Photobioreactorfor Mitigation of CO2 Using an Indigenous Thermophilic Microalgal StrainGeitlerinema sulphureum

Anuja A Kenekar and Manjushri A Deodhar*

Anthropogenic activities leading to the industrial revolution have contributed substantially to climate change by adding carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere which has caused a gradual but significant increase in the atmospheric temperature through the years. Part of the efforts to mitigate CO2 involves the capture and sequestration using microalgae. Efforts were made in KET’s VG Vaze College to screen indigenously isolated thermophilic cyanobacteria for this purpose. High temperature adaptability (42ºC), high CO2 tolerance (23.08%), reasonably high biomass production and easy harvesting made G. sulphureum a promising candidate for the CO2 sequestration in the tropical climatic conditions. The present communication deals with the optimisation of productivity of G. sulphureum in a lab scale tubular photobioreactor by altering paramters such as light regime, CO2 supplementation, and nitrate and carbon source optimisation. The baseline productivity was 0.035 g/Lday before optimisation. In case of the cumulatively optimised productivity, it increased to 0.094 g/Lday with the highest reported biomass concentration of 1.29 g/L.