Stephen Milburn

Stephen Milburn

Feb 16, 2023

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The Algae Needs to Sleep!

By Ally Sheller

Remember needing to pass out on the sofa after Christmas dinner to digest everything? Algae do that too. To have the most efficient photosynthesis and highest growth rate, algae like a dark period of eight hours after 16 hours of illumination every day. This allows them to take a rest from capturing sunlight and CO2 and focus on converting these products into biomass. The length of light/dark periods has an effect on the lipid content of the algae too - having a 16/8 hour split produces a higher lipid content than short cycles, which means our algae are more efficient at capturing carbon (Wang et al., 2014).

There is no significant increase in growth when algae are exposed to longer, 24 hour periods of illumination (Atta et al., 2013), which is why our experimental design features 16 hours of illumination broken up by rest periods, so us and the algae can both get some sleep.

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About This Project

To stop the negative effects of climate change we need carbon capture technology to be developed and deployed worldwide as soon as possible. Nellie is a direct air carbon capture system that is able to help solve this global problem using microalgae. We have a working prototype and now need to test certain additives which will increase the efficiency of our system and accelerate the at-scale removal of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Blast off!

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