Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Motivation
Recent decades, the issue of Global Warming and Energy safety had
come up for animated discussion. Many environment-related
protocols and energy projects were conducted. In the environment
side, burning of fossil fuels, especially coals, discharged bulk of carbon
dioxide and nitrogen, sulfur oxides, particulate matter containing
exhaust. In addition, the particulate matters (PM), which is well
discussed recently, had led to many heart and lung related diseases. In
the cases of energy safety, there were many nuclear power plant and
radioactive substances concerned accidents, including the recent one
caused by tsunami in 2011, Japan.
The nuclear power plant needs more land to ensure the safety of
people, and is inappropriate to some land-less countries, like Taiwan.
Though nuclear power is almost zero carbon emitted (Figure1.), the
cost of any accident is incalculable to a society. Due to this, we would
like to design a set-up that can combine the thermal power plant to
achieve both energy safety and environmental protection.
Figure 1. The greenhouse gas
emissions by each power plant.
Nuclear power plants are also
greenhouse gas produced, but far
less than thermal ways. (World
Nuclear Association, 9 Dec 2015)
Introduction
Idea Design
industry.
Figure 4. The interaction between chloroplast and mitochondria in a plant cell. Chloroplasts
can convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose by solar energy; mitochondrion utilize
glucose to generate ATP (the energy currency in cells) for some cellular biochemical pathways.
In addition, in animal cells, they can only conduct respiration reaction, like how we burn fossil
fuels to generate electricity nowadays.
Figure 6. The simplified energy and substances flow of proposed system. Red rectangle
shows the traditional thermal power plant; while, green one indicates the algal cultural unit
in this system. Thermal power plant produce electricity, exhaust and carbon dioxide from
fuels' combustion.
The land size and stability of algal cultivation should be considered first. The
retention time of each algal cell, converting efficiency under different conditions
(e.g. temperature, light intensity) and the quantity of exhaust would decide what
volume of cultivation we should pick. Many thermal power plants were built
beside shores, so maybe the sea "land" can also be set as the saline algal
cultivation. The other point is that the cultivation of algae is sometimes unstable
resulting from the bacterial and fungal contamination. Last but not least, we are
not to promote 100 percent baseload electricity supplied by thermal power
plant, nuclear power is also necessary; but by this, we can reduce the side-effect
from it.
Many algal bio-energy related studies have been conducted for decades. First is
the ability of some certain green algae that can produce hydrogen discovered by
Gaffron coworkers since 1939. [1,2]; the hydrogen production is catalyzed by
hydrogenase localized in chloroplast stroma. [3] Most of the methane producing
methods are combining algal cultivation and anaerobic bacterial fermentation.
[4,5]
there many results about different micro-algal lipids content ratio, reaction
efficiency, chemical or physical environmental conditions refer to lipid synthesis
and storage..., etc. Finally, there still some potentials that are not listed here, e.g.
the ability of adsorb radioactive matter and heavy metal in so called biomediation.
Reference
1. Gaffron H. 1939. Reduction of Co2 with H2 in green plants. Nature 143:204-205.
2. Gaffron H. 1944. Photosynthesis, photoreduction and dark reduction of carbon dioxide
in certain algae. Biol Rev Cambridge Philos Soc 19:1-20.
3. Happe T, Mosler B, Naber JD. 1994. Induction, localization and metal content of
hydrogenase in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Eur J Biochem 222:769-774.
4. G. Hansson. 1983. Methane production from marine, green macro-algae. Resources
and Conversation. vol. 8:185-194.
5. Hernndez D, Solana M, Riao B, Garca-Gonzlez MC, Bertucco A. 2014. Biofuels from
microalgae: lipid extraction and methane production from the residual biomass in a
biorefinery approach. Bioresour Technol. 170:370-8.