SBIR Phase I: Optical methods for improving productivity of microalgae cultivation

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is in removing carbon dioxide and other pollutants generated by agriculture. Concentrated animal feeding operations are an integral element in the American economy and food system. Today, manure from dairy and swine operations is stored in lagoons where it festers for months before eventually being spread as fertilizer. Lagoon runoff contaminates the environment and endangers public health downstream, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in losses; methane and nitrous oxide gases pollute and warm the atmosphere; and valuable nutrients are lost. Rather than being in conflict with our environmental, health, and resource stewardship priorities, this project will help empower animal farms to be climate positive. This project creates that connection, enabling animal farm wastes today to efficiently, cleanly, and easily become fertilizer or animal feed for farms tomorrow. And because the technology captures carbon, farmers can verifiably store the carbon in soil, thereby empowering large farms and small farms alike to sell into the burgeoning carbon economy. This project develops a new class of illumination methods that will enable an ultra-high density, high efficiency microalgae hybrid-photobioreactor scrubber for reactive carbon capture at the source in agriculture waste management systems. Algae bioreactors under development in this SBIR Phase I project may bridge the productivity gap between low-cost manure ponds and expensive algal biofuel photobioreactors. Productivity of microalgae reactors is generally limited by light distribution, as the algae nearest the surface consume all the light. New low-cost optical methods in optics and reactor management will allow natural sunlight to be delivered within the algae volume rather than at the surface, thus vastly accelerating carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus capture during wastewater processing, at no extra energy cost. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.