Turning algae into aviation fuel

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>>Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to the Greenlab Research facility. This is a facility dedicated to the next generation of aviation fuel, using halophyte. A halophyte is a salt tolerating plant. Most plants done like salt, but halophytes tolerate salt. We also are using weeds, and we're also using algae. The good thing about our lab is we've had 3600 visitors in the last two years. Why do you think that's so? Because we are onto something special. So, in the lower, you'll see the Greenlab, obviously, and on the right-hand side, you'll see algae. If you are into the business of the next generation of aviation fuels, algae is a viable option, there's a lot of funding right now, and we have an algae to fuels program. There's two types of algae grown. One is a closed photobioreactor that you see here, and what you see on the other side is our species. We use; we're currently using a species using inaudible. Our job at NASA is to take the experimental and computational and make a better mixing for the closed photobioreactors. Now the problem with closed photobioreactors are, they're quite expensive, they're automated, and it's very difficult to get them in large scale. So, on large scale, what do they use? We use open pond systems. Now, around the world, they're growing algae with these racetrack designs that you see here, looks like an oval, with a paddle wheel, it mixes really well, but when it gets around the last turn, which I call turn 4, it's stagnant. We actually have a solution for that. In the Greenlab, in our open pond system, we use something that happens in nature, waves. We actually use wave technology in our open pond system. We have 95% mixing and our lipid content is higher than a closed photobioreactor system, which we think is significant.

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