Spirulina Bioreactor Media Recycling

One of the advantageous features of a bioreactor compared to traditional agriculture is the ability recycle the water after filtering out extracted biomass. That requires a means of testing remaining nutrients in the media in order to return them to standard concertations prior to reuse. This would compensate consumed nutrients used in the bioreactor.

I am growing spirulina in a bioreactor I built. The project is outlined in this video: https://youtu.be/Vdy6F3-Gg1M

My media is made of sodium bicarbonate for ph and carbon. Hydroponics fertilizer and sea salt. The fertilizer is called maxigro and their website details the following constituents: Ammonium Molybdate, Ammonium Nitrate, Calcium Nitrate, Calcium Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Iron DTPA, Magnesium Sulfate, Manganese EDTA, Potassium Borate, Potassium Nitrate, Potassium Phosphate and Zinc Sulfate.

I am looking for recommendations on how to measure the remaining amount of nutrients to be able to replenish the water before putting it back in the system. I suspect it will need to be a combination of testing methods. Ideally it can be completely automated when combined with a dosing system.

@“Rafik”#p71 In hydroponics you use an EC (Electrical Conductivity) probe to measure the nutrient levels in your media. Typically you’d just stick a device like the Bluelab Truncheon into your reservoir to get an EC reading.

I bought a [wireless EC sensor](https://www.tindie.com/products/a_lab_technology/wireless-ec-sensor/) a while ago to automate my hydroponics setup, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I've also been meaning to read through [this blog post on building a $3 EC meter](https://hackaday.io/project/7008-hacking-the-way-to-growing-food/log/24646-three-dollar-ec-ppm-meter-arduino).

I'm not a water expert though, maybe @Martin has some other ideas?

@Rafik yea, I think the key thing here is finding whatever is growth limiting. Basically you’re going to have a growth limiting substrate - something that the bugs are using all of, so they can’t grow any more. Your EC probe will tell you that the overall mix has a certain amount of ions in it, but it won’t tell you which ions. If there’s a fairly high concentration of sea salt, that’s likely to be a lot of the conductivity.

While you could attempt to measure each of the ions individually, that's not going to be cost effective. If this was a commercial operation, you'd probably want to make your most expensive input (per unit biomass output) the growth limiting substrate. That will both minimise initial opex (as you're not putting in an excess of the most expensive ingredient) but also put a selective pressure on your culture to cope with less of the most expensive nutrient.

If you're adding bulk trace nutrients, rather than adding them individually, the growth limiting one would be the one that I'd measure for. That said, traditionally your trace nutrients wouldn't be either growth limiting, or most expensive. It would normally be something like the carbon or energy source. In this case CO2, or light.

So, I'd try reducing your overall trace nutrient mix until you see a drop in productivity, then increase it again until you see no more increase in productivity (and you know it's in excess), then try turning down the light until you see a drop in productivity then increase it again until you see no more increase in productivity, then turning down the aeration, etc. Look at the cost of each and ensure the most expensive one is growth limiting.

If it transpires that the nutrient mix isn't your economic pinch point, then add excess, and control it based on EC as @"Gerrit"#4 suggests.

You'll only have an issue if one of your trace nutrients becomes growth limiting. The concern I have is that if you're recycling your growth media, then if say the sodium chloride isn't being consumed by the bugs but the potassium nitrate is, then over time the potassium nitrate concentration may drop even though you are maintaining the EC. I'm not sure how you address this other than by repeating your growth limiting checks for each of the trace nutrients individually, or measuring everything.

At small scale, I imagine you'll find that wasting trace nutrients is more economically viable than maximising recycle and controlling them to perfection. Conversely you may want to measure everything, so you can set up a digital twin that can then scale up to fully optimised production that minimises all waste.

@“Martin”#p73 @“Gerrit”#p72

Thanks for the detailed replies. As of right now, the EC option seems like the only feasible option at my scale. However, the hope behind this project is for it to be theoretically scalable to industrial size. I did see some products such as this that measure multiple things separately but I still need to dig deeper into how it works/costs: https://www.ntsensors.com/analysis-in-spirulina/

Martin summarized my worry perfectly in this paragraph: "The concern I have is that if you're recycling your growth media, then if say the sodium chloride isn't being consumed by the bugs but the potassium nitrate is, then over time the potassium nitrate concentration may drop even though you are maintaining the EC. I'm not sure how you address this other than by repeating your growth limiting checks for each of the trace nutrients individually, or measuring everything."

To summarize: considering all nutrients aren't being consumed at the same level, eventually, the least consumed one will saturate the water preventing other nutrients from mixing, or even worse a very high concentration of specific nutrients would be bad for the algae.

My concern is with water waste over nutrient waste. This is especially important for an industrial-scale system that will use a large volume of water. Maybe in an industrial system, it could be a balance of recycling water for a set amount of runs and then running it through reverse osmosis filters or other cleaning mechanisms to reset it.

@“Rafik”#p74 Of course, if you’re monitoring growth rate and all looks well then you probably have enough of everything.

When the growth decreases you could do offline determination to see what’s lacking. Then buy an online probe to cover that. And repeat as needed.