Archive:The Algae Trials

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The Algae Trials Release status: obsolete [box doku]
Description	A series of experiments with algae
Author(s)	Severin

What can we do with algae? Supposedly, algae is a super food, can be used as biofuel, and even be made into yoga mats. Let's give it a shot.

Growing Algae

First series of experiments: how easy is it to grow algelae, and what's the best way to do it?

Getting algae

Mostly, algae seems to be sold as "super food", in a dried und thus pretty dead condition. Getting alive algae was a bit harder, but there are some aquaristic shops in Germany that sell live algae. I decided to use Chlorella algae for this experiment. It seems to be a fatty algae, which is nice since I wanted to try and use it to make biodiesel. It's also a fresh water algae, and happened to be the only fresh water algae the shop I bought it at was selling.

I bought 500ml of "algae", and started the experiments.

Experiment 1: does it grow at all?

Setup:

• 500ml algae
• 500ml water
• 1 1l transparent glass wine bottle

Log

• Aug 28, afternoon: fill algae and water into bottle. Shake. Placed in a somewhat bright spot inside
• next few days: shake regularly
• Aug 31, afternoon: there's some algae floating around the bottle, more than before. So the algae seems to grow. Also, there seems to be enough to do some more experiments.

Experiment 2: how does air help the growing process?

Setup:

• 1l algae water from exp. 1
• 1l water
• 2 1l bottles
• small air stone
• aquarium air pump

Log

• Aug 31, afternoon: put the same amounts of water and algae into the bottles. Put the air stone connected to the airpump into one of the bottles and turn it on.
• Sep 1, afternoon: feeding. Having not tried this before was probably a bad idea, but let's give a shot. I bought a small pipette (one for a 10ml bottle), and gave two fillings of normal plant fertilizer into each bottle.
• Roughly a week later: The algae with the airstone in it seems to have not grown as much as the one without it. We need to repeat this eventually.

Experiment 3: Produce a lot of algae

Setup:

• Algae water from the previous experiments
• Algae reactor
• Light
• Pump

Log:

• Built the algae reactor in a few iterations
  • First rough design was impractical, requires too much work to put together
  • Second design iteration is a lot easier to built. Need to upload the design somewhere
• Run the algae reactor for a long time: [1]
• Frequently get the algae out into different bottles and refill the reactor with water and nutrients