Photobiohydrogen production and high-performance photobioreactor - Solar Energy Sciences and Engineering Applications - page 354

Figure 11.4.2 Column photobioreactor configurations: (a) column photobioreactor with the internal
illumination (Chen et al., 2010), and; (b) torus-shaped photobioreactor (Fouchard et al.,
2008).
impeller ensured a good mixing without dead zone, improving the photobiohydrogen
production performance.
11.4.1.2 Flat panel photobioreactor
A flat panel photobioreactor is an enclosed rectangular transparent chamber with a
shallow depth and relatively large length and width as depicted in Figure 11.4.1b,
which can be placed vertically, leanly, or horizontally and illuminated from one side
by the incident light. In large-scale photobiohydrogen production applications, several
photobioreactors are usually arranged in-parallel to increase the system volume. This
design offers many merits such as large illumination surface area, good light path and
ease to clean up, all of which make it suitable for outdoor cultures (Ugwa et al., 2008).
A good example of this type of photobioreactor is the one used for photobiohydro-
gen production with Rhodopseudomonas sp . HCC 2037 by Hoekema et al. (2002).
In this design as shown in Figure 11.4.3, the flat panel photobioreactor consists of
a stainless-steel frame and three polycarbonate panels, forming two compartments.
One compartment contains the bacterial culture with the desirable temperature main-
tained by the circulated water in another compartment via a water bath. The results
showed that light energy can be efficiently utilized using this flat-panel photobioreac-
tor. Although promising, the flat panel photobioreactor still have some limitations of
complex structure, support materials required upon scale-up, wall growth, high power
consumption of mixing, etc. (Akkerman et al., 2002; Ugwa et al., 2008). Therefore, it
is necessary to modify the configuration of the flat panel photobioreactor for improv-
ing the photobiohydrogen production performance. Zhang et al. (2001) designed a
flat plate photobioreactor with the addition of baffles to improve the agitation for
better mixing. Tredici et al. (1991) devised an alveolar panel photobioreactor which