High photosynthetic productivity of green microalga Chlorella sorokiniana

The batch culture of a newly isolated strain of a green microalga, Chlorella sorokiniana, was carried out using a conical helical tubular photobioreactor. The isolate was capable of good growth at 40°C under an airstream enriched with 10% CO₂. The maximum photosynthetic productivity was 34.4g of dry biomass/(m² of installation area · d) (12-h light/12-h dark cycle) when the cells were illuminated with an average photosynthetic photon flux density (photosynthetically active radiation ([PAR] 400–700 nm) simulating the outdoors in central Japan (0.980 mmol photons/[m²·s]). This corresponded to a photosynthetic efficiency of 8.67% (PAR), which was defined as the percentage of the light energy recovered as biomass (394 kJ/[reactor·d]) to the total light energy received (4545 kJ/[reactor·d]). A similarly high photosynthetic efficiency (8.12% [PAR]) was also attained in the combined presence of 10% CO₂, 100 ppm of NO, and 25 ppm of SO₂. Moreover, good photosynthetic productivity was also obtained under high temperature and high light intensity conditions (maximum temperature, 46.5°C; 1.737 mmol photons/[m²·s]), when simulating the strong irradiance of the midday summer sun. This strain thus appears well suited for practical application for converting CO₂ present in the stack gases emitted by thermal power plants and should be feasible even during the hot summer weather.