Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
Edit: With regard to the algae concentration disparity in the lab and the algae ponds, I suspect that 20g dry weight per litre is probably not feasible outside of small scale lab conditions with tender loving care and you'd probably ideally want a lower concentration so that your algae has space to grow into as it captures the CO2.
While industrial scaling does tend to lose efficiency (which I'm sure you know given your profession) due to concepts like "well mixed" having a tendency to get hilarious as simplifications this particular case is probably less of an issue. A glorified CSTR at low flow rate operating at the high end of viable concentration is probably going to work fine, though keeping weight low is potentially fun.

Also fun is dealing with the accumulated dead algae in the outlet stream, trying not to waste live algae by having them in the outlet stream where you suddenly care much more about that due to mass restrictions, and what the inevitable recycle process there means for the inlet stream. Granted, unseen complications and complications worse than they seem can always crop up, but there's not a lot of reason to think that this particular design would be too bad. It's fairly similar to a lot of the e. coli bioreactors used for production of organics, except that you don't have to separate out the oxygen from the water the way you do with most products.