Thursday, October 19, 2017

Bio Reactor 1.0 and 2.0

Howdy all,

I will now share with you the trials and tribulations of my bioreactors. I wanted to create the bioreactor as a way of increasing the green material I put into my compost heap and a way of sucking out additional CO2 from the atmosphere (since I dable in the sciences), with out using too much water. Even though you can see bottles filled with water, they actually didn't evaporate that much since each were closed off at the end (See below).



The bioreactor is basically bottles filled with water, a small amount of fertilizer, and green balls of algae left over from Bioreactor 1.0. My first bioreactor had the same exact set up, except I had tried to grow a specific strain of Cyanobacteria, called Spirulina. This is the same stuff in Naked Juice green machine, which I wanted to try my hand at growing since it had the added benefit of being edible. Well, all in all bioreactor 1.0 was a failure. I couldn't find live strains of Spirulina on the internet, and so bought some powered stuff on the assumption that some spores might still be active. All I managed to do was grow string Algae, the most hated annoyance of pond owners.

Anyways, back to set up. The bioreactor was set up in two chains. In the first bottle I have two air hoses. One delivers air pumped from a small aquarium filter, and discharged it into the bottom of the bottle, allowing the oxygen and CO2 to be absorbed into the water. The air is then discharged into the the bottom of the second bottle, and so on in a chain:


The bioreactor experiment worked well. I managed to grow algae (not that hard, I know), but not nearly as much mass as I would have liked. Usually the first bottle had the most green and vibrant algae, which decreased as you went further down the chain. I take this as proof that the C02 is getting absorbed, since it must be limited the growth in the bottles.

I found that the amount of fertilizer you use is a very steep learning curve, meaning that if you put too much you kill the algae, but I am sure that I didn't experiment enough to find out the perfect amount. As well, as you can tell by the bright blue color, I used dreaded chemical fertilizers (miracle grow), which I have since stopped using, and replaced with compost tea (basically the liquid that comes off of my worm composter).

I stopped experimenting with this type of set up. Mostly because it was hard to get the algae out of the bottles. I have since started experimenting with growing duckweed (and unfortunately algae if I dont pay attention). I'll post more about this in the future, as well as approximating how much carbon I can get out.


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