TY - THES A1 - Szewczyk, Mateusz T1 - A Novel Multiphase Slug Flow Tubular Photobioreactor for the Cultivation of Unicellular Photosynthetic Organisms N2 - Microalgae cultivation offers a sustainable alternative to another production organisms that are used in biotechnological industry – since they are able to remove carbon dioxide from atmosphere and various nutrients from wastewater, converting them into various products. However, due to lack of efficient and cost-effective cultivation methods, the development of this branch of biotechnology is not as rapid as anticipated. This thesis introduces a novel multiphase slug flow tubular photobioreactor as a potential solution to some of the aforementioned problems. The novel photobioreactor combines the advantages of slug flow regime and tubular photobioreactors: enhanced mass transfer and mixing rates as well as enlarged illumination area. The main goal of this thesis was the construction and implementation of this novel photobioreactor design. In order to achieve this, various experiments have been conducted, including toxicity assessment of organic solvents and hydrodynamics tests of the three-phase slug flow into long microchannels. The toxicity assessment revealed that n-decane and sunflower oil are the most biocompatible of the tested solvents. It was also found that all the examined alkanes allow fairly stable slug flow generation in a 1mm ID capillary as opposed to sunflower oil, which was found not suitable for that capillary diameter, as it caused its blockage. The results of the final experiment reveal that there is still a lot of room for improvement in the novel photobioreactor concept, as it was found that the biomass concentration decreases over time of cultivation. It was hypothesized that the reason for the cell number decrease is the improved mixing and mass transfer rate that enhanced toxicity of the organic solvent. KW - Microalgae cultivation KW - Novel photobioreactor design KW - Multiphase slug flow Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:1383-opus4-2488 ER -