Title: Strategies for managing industrial anaerobic sludge and digestates through the cultivation of Chlorella sorokiniana: An approach from the bioprocess intensification

Abstract

Microalgae provides an alternative for the valorization of industrial by-products, in which the nutritional content varies substantially and directly affects microalgae system performance. Herein, the (i) heterotrophic and (ii) mixotrophic cultivation of Chlorella sorokiniana was systematically studied from an intensification bioprocess perspective, allowing us to detect for the first case: a nutritional deficiency other than the carbon source through assessing the oxygen transfer rate for glucose or acetate fermentation. Consequently, a mathematical model of the iron co-limiting effect on heterotrophic microalgae was developed by exploring its ability to regulate the specific growth rate and yield. For instance, higher values of the specific growth rate (0.17 h-1) compared with those reported for the heterotrophic culture of Chlorella were obtained due to iron supplementation. Therefore, anaerobic sludge from an industrial wastewater treatment plant (a baker’s yeast company) was pretreated to obtain an extract as a media supplement for C. sorokiniana. According to the proposed model, the sludge extract allowed us to supplement iron values close to the growth activation concentration (KFe ~12 mg L-1). Therefore, a fed-batch strategy was evaluated on nitrogen-deprived cultures supplemented with the sludge extract to promote biomass formation and fatty acid synthesis. Our findings reveal that nitrogen and iron in sludge extract can supplement heterotrophic cultures of Chlorella and provide an alternative for the valorization of industrial anaerobic sludge. For the case of mixotrophic cultivation of C. sorokiniana a digestate derived from the anaerobic digestion of swine manure (Industrial farms in Valle del Cauca, Colombia) was previously pretreated by physic-chemical methods and further used as nutrients for the microalgal growth. These evaluations were performed into flasks and a flat-photobioreactor (Subitec GmbH, Germany) and demonstrated a potential use of this by-product as process component of a most sustainable production scheme to get microalgal biomass.