Date of Award:

5-2012

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Byard Wood (Committee Co-Chair), Robert Spall (Committee Co-Chair)

Committee

Byard Wood

Committee

Robert Spall

Committee

Ronald Sims

Abstract

Current standards of living and future prosperity are closely tied to the availability of sufficient and inexpensive energy resources. Currently society is fueled primarily by some form of fossil fuel. By their very nature these fuel sources are non-renewable, thus our current energy habits are unsustainable. Among the various renewable energy technologies is the capability to produce diesel fuel by colonies of algae. While this technology has many positive features it remains too expensive to be a realistic fuel source. The current work performed analysis using computer simulation of an aquatic environment commonly used to grow algae for the purposes of harvesting diesel fuel in order to identify design opportunities that would lead to higher productivities, having the impact of lowering the fuel costs. It was found that minor alterations to these environments produce mixing that is expected to increase algae growth with a limited impact on the operational costs of a fuel production facility. These results have the benefit of providing insight and direction into how we might plausible lower algae diesel costs. The cost associated with this research was entirely the result of personnel, software, and hardware costs having a combined expense of approximately $50,000.

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Comments

This work made publicly available electronically on September 20, 2012.

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