Ricerc@Sapienza

Microalgal productivity under changing conditions of light intensity and temperature is a crucial parameter for evaluating profitability and sustainability of an outdoor cultivation in cylindrical photobioreactors. The control of the principal outdoor variables, even for the more accurate systems, is subject to a wide number of factors that might influence the measures taken, thus falsifying their correlation with the microalgal growth.

Biotechnologic processes based on microalgae cultivations have had an increasing interest from the early 2000s. Microalgae are microorganisms able to produce and accumulate a large variety of industrially relevant compounds starting from renewable and cheap resources. However, 3–10 € per kg of dry biomass is the minimum cost for microalgae biomass production that has been estimated by different studies published in 2016. This high cost restricts industrial applications only to the production of high-value products.