Facebook Pixel3-in-1 - Algae farm, air purifier, nutricious snack machine
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3-in-1 - Algae farm, air purifier, nutricious snack machine

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jnikola
jnikola May 19, 2022
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Air purifying machine that produces healthy algae-based "cookies" for your household.
Why?
  • Air purifiers are cool but sometimes too bulky for the one purpose they offer.
  • Besides just filtering, why the air purifier wouldn't actually reduce the CO2?
  • People often have mineral and vitamin deficiencies. Can we somehow make it fun for them to take their daily dose?
  • People love nice-looking aquariums. Isn't this nice, too?
Source
How would it work?
The machine would work almost the same as these two machines (Spirugrow, Bloom), which allow you to farm your own microalgae.
  • Not only it would look like a nice aquarium and make your home beautiful and full of life,
  • but it can be used for multiple purposes. If you wanted to use it as a meal in its gelly form, as a face mask or a plant fertilizer, you could just take it out. You could even press the dry mode ON button and get your home-brewed nutritiousalgae cookie in a minute!
  • Since microalgae use CO2, the produced O2 could be pumped into the integrated air purifying segment which would enrich your apartment with clean filtered and O2-rich air.
The technology is here, we just need to combine it to make the best use of it :)
2
Creative contributions

Algae create oxygen and power the air purifier

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jnikola
jnikola May 24, 2022
Scientists created an algae battery that created a current during the photosynthesis of Synechocystis algae. The voltage was 0.7 V and the energy was generated even during the night! The battery was used to power a small chip doing some lightweight computation.
My idea would be to use the algae inside the air purifier to fully power the air purifier or make it work hybrid, requiring much less energy than standard electrical devices.
My idea is inspired by a video and a paper found by Darko Savic.
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Solar-powered algae biomass production overnight

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jnikola
jnikola Jul 30, 2022
Recently, a paper was published explaining a hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production. In short, a new artificial photosynthetic-inspired system that produces acetate that can be directly incorporated into plant, yeast, fungi or algae biomass was developed and was shown to be four times more effective than photosynthesis.
If such a system could be engineered into cyanobacteria/microalgae along with standard photosynthetic system to allow biomass production even during the night (by addition of acetate during night), that could result in much more effective food production from this home device. Maybe a combination of standard and engineered algae could be used to produce biomass. Even a fully engineered species could be used if small solar panel would be attached to the system and constantly "feed" algae with acetate!
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General comments

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Subash Chapagain
Subash Chapagain3 years ago
Cool idea. If it can be realised, it pretty much makes superfood at your home. Still, I have some doubts about the post-production processing of the produced algae. I personally did not like the taste of the Spirulina stuff (I tried it back in 2017), and if we could also set up a pipeline for taste enhancement of the product, that would make it more palatable and the idea likely to sell more.
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jnikola
jnikola3 years ago
Subash Chapagain Thank you for your comment! I never tried it but according to how it looks, I would agree with you. I'll start a new idea about this :)
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Michaela D
Michaela D3 years ago
I like the principle and I agree that purifiers are pretty big for what they offer. How were you thinking of fitting the farm+food machine in an air purifier? Would you not need to make it even bigger?
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jnikola
jnikola3 years ago
Michaela D Hey! If you check the links I provided, you will see that machines like this exist and they produce your daily dose of Spirulina, which is, according to what they say (and Subash Chapagain, too), super nutiricious! But, as Subash mentioned, the taste is bad. SO that's one improvement and the other one is combining it with an air purifier. To my knowledge, air purifiers are big because of the big filters that can filter bigger volumes of air in a shorter time. Therefore, some calculations regarding the optimal daily algae yield, the balance of the filtered air per minute, and its size should be done.
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