This is Haochen Zhang, a MA design products student from Royal College of Art. And I’m currently working on a project about removing nutrition of flashed dairy manure. After learning some relevant materials, I realized that microalgae is a very effective means of treating wastewater, and I want to design products which can take use of microalgae (Chlorella) to help local rural residents transform the water to new resource. But now I lack of detailed and professional guidance. So I sincerely hope that I can get an opportunity to learn from you, and get more advice about this project.
Here are some questions which have been confusing me so much:
1. Will sterilization influence the effect of chlorella growing? If I want to sterilize the flushed manure water (100% sterilization), how much do I need to heat it to what temperature? And how long should it last? Can a sterile environment be achieved by simple boiling? Will high-temperature heating produce toxic substances in manure?
2. Is it necessary to re-dilution to feed chlorella with flashed manure water? Is it sufficient as a source of nutrition for chlorella? Do I need to add more nutrients? To what extent can the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water body be absorbed by chlorella?
3. What indicators should be paid attention to in the environment of cultivating chlorella? For non-professionals, is it difficult to cultivate chlorella with the water? What is the most suitable container volume for cultivating it?
4. Can the cultivated chlorella be directly used for fertilization (spraying or watering on vegetables)? Does it have a positive effect or additional economic value for agricultural production?
I sincerely hope that I can harvest precious opinions and opportunities to learn from you. Your suggestions must be very valuable to me. I hope with your help, my project can become a good design that has a practical effect on society! If possible, I hope to have more contact with you, thank you very much! !
Hi there,
Which species of Chlorella you want to use?
i will answer for every point:
1-To test any kind of biomass, the sterilization is mandatory, specially when you want to use manure as nutrient source...
With boiling you can't sterilize because you will reach at maximum 100°C in atmospheric condition, so you should use an autoclave.
About the toxic compounds, you should not have any problem, but the precipitation of some substances can occur.
2- Chlorella is a genus of green algae with high metabolic flexibility, so they can recover many type of nutrients from the manure, i suggest to make a bibliographic research on scopus or google scholar because many research group already worked on that.
You should analyze the chemical composition of your manure, and see if some nutrients are limitant or in excess... remember that Chlorella is a freshwater algae so high salinity can affect the growth.
But i would test the optimal concentration of manure to use anyway...
3- Chlorella is not hard to cultivate, but you have to be careful for bacterial contamination, because with manure you will have a high organic load that can lead to a bacterial or fungal growth that can overcome the microalgal growth.
I suggest to begin with little volumes (100-200 mL) in Erlenmayer flask on orbital shaker, under continuous light (150-200 LUX)
4- i'm not an expert in this field, i know that Chlorella is known as biostimulant for plants, however in scientific literature this is an aspect widely studied
Hello, Mr. Giovanni.
Thank you very much for your patient and detailed answers, these are really helpful for me! I am really grateful to you! (*^_^*)
May I ask you more professional questions by email, because I would like to show you my design proposal to discuss more detailed questions. So could you please share me your e-mail address?Thanks again for your help!
Sincerely and best wishes,
Haochen.
What is your target to clean water or to produce algae. If you are cleaning water, then which are the things you want to remove from it. And finally is there any reason for which you are using Chlorella
Hello Mr. Rachan. Thank you very much for your reply. My target is to clean water and 5 indicators are expected to reduced by Chlorella: COD, TN, TP, NH4. I think the reason why I use the Chlorella is that the Chlorella is a very common type of algae in agriculture production, which somehow would make the manure water into useful resource for local farmer to form a cycle of resource (e.g. used as fertilizer). Another reason is Chlorella has more general business value than other types. But Chlorella is just start point of my project, maybe I would try different types and mixed sample with the project gonging on to balance the profit between clean efficiency and commercial value.
I think the solution is to use diluted cow manure in open ponds. Sunlight will help to "sterilize" or at least reduce the number of bacteria. If the conditions are right, a natural algae flora can occur in the ponds. If there is too much organic matter, saprotrophic organisms will grow. They too can probably be harvested and used as compost.
Arne Andersen Thanks for your suggestion, it seems to be a more efficient and practical way. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether it takes longer to degrade cow dung water by the growth of saprophytes than when using microalgae?
I do not know what the speed is like, but in nature the saprophytes come before algae with a large supply of organic matter. Saprophytes are a characteristic of the supply of sewage or manure.
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