The establishment of algae based production processes for application in different goods such as food, feed, nutritional supplements, medicine, fuel or platform chemicals is increasingly gaining more attention. A main reason for this development might be due to the crescent need to replace conventional industrial processes with more sustainable ways of production.
Microalgae have multiple applications in many diverse sectors that already make their cultivation profitable, such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics or food supplements. One of the most appealing applications of microalgae lies on the energy sector because of microalgae’s high lipid content and renewable nature.
Microalgae processes exhibit a remarkable complexity due to the interaction of multiple phenomena that span multiple time scales, ranging from milliseconds to days, and from nanometres to hundreds of meters in industrial plants, involving quantum phenomena, cell metabolism, turbulence and fluid flow behaviour, light diffusion, mass and energy transport phenomena, interactions with the equipment design,
