No abstract

A structured model for the culture of cyanobacteria in photobioreactors is developed on the basis of Schuster's approximations for radiative light transfer. This model is therefore limited to monodimensional geometries and kinetic aspects.Light-harvesting pigments play a crucial role in defining the profile of radiative transfer inside the culture medium and in controlling the metabolism, particularly the metabolic deviations induced by mineral limitations. Modeling therefore requires the biomass to be divided into several compartments, among which the light-harvesting compartment allows a working illuminated volume to be defined within the photobioreactor. This volume may change during batch cultures, largely decreasing as pigment concentration increases during growth but increasing as pigments are consumed during mineral limitation. This approach enables, in photobioreactors of simple parallelepipedic, geometries, kinetic parameters to be determined with high accuracy; this may then be extended to vessels of more complex geometries, such as cylindrical photobioreactors.The model is applied to controlled batch cultures of the cyanobacterium Spirulina platensis in parallelepipedic photobioreactors to assess its ability to predict the behavior of these microorganisms in conditions of light and mineral limitations. Results allowed the study of optimal operating condition for continuous cultures to be approached.