Algae Farm

After further research, we realized that using algae in our project as actual biofuel was never going to work, the technology does not exist in a truly usable form yet to pull this off. So, even though this first plan was not feasible for our project, we still decided we wanted to work with algae and have our project be heliotropic in the sense that the algae goes through photosynthesis, thus running off of the sunlight. So, we decided that if we couldn't actually use algae for biofuel, we could try to bring the idea of biofuels out to the public. To do this, we actually wanted to have a visually pleasing array set up that could grow two specific strands of algae, one used to make biofuel and one type that was bioluminescent (Pyrocystis Fusiformis), or a algae farm. This array would be put on the sides of buildings so that people could see it and interact with it and learn about biofuels. The array was inspired by Steve Pikes, an architect that designed an architectural array that had containers of bacteria and mold growing in the array. We took that idea but replaced it with algae so that during the day the algae will grow and people can interact with it and at night the bioluminescent algae would glow and act as an off the grid light source. The algae would only glow, however, when it was agitated so it was going to be worked out so that people could interact with this algae farm and cause the algae to glow. Both types of algae will be able to be harvested so that the containers can be kept clean and so that the algae can be used for fuel and for light. The figure below is an example of a biofuel/bioalgae farm that is being grown in the Venice cannals right now.

This next image if a conceptual image of our project idea. The algae would be mixed randomly in the array, some containers with the biofuel algae and some with the bioluminescent algae. In the image, the algae containers are the larger blue squares. The smaller black squares were solar panels that we were going to use to power the air pumps needed to keep the algae alive.

The last image is a 3D rendering of the project as if it was glowing at night.