Traditional foods used for livestock rearing, such as maize and soybeans, are suffering from increasing environmental pressures. Drought, flooding and other environmental factors can dramatically reduce the yield of animal feed, which could potentially lead to higher feed and meat prices as well as the risk of underfed or sick livestock. Therefore, Birmingham City university is investigating alternative food stocks using microalgae and computational modelling.
Researchers
Research background
There is an increasing demand for an alternative feedstock for livestock production. Microalgae as a feed supplement is promising to mitigate the increasing demand for food crop (maize and soybeans) as an animal feed ingredient. Therefore, the focus of this research is to design and optimise a low technology, cost-effective microalgae cultivation system for the proliferation of feed supplement for livestock production with the numerical analysis of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).
Research aims
The aim and major contribution of this research is to develop an integrated mathematical model with CFD that generates the microalgae growth and production with the optimised Open Raceway Pond (ORP) design for the production of animal feed supplement for livestock agriculture. The success of this research will introduce a low technology, cost-effective and optimised system design for the cultivation of microalgae for animal feed supplement production in mitigating the increasing demand.
Research methods
The research method is carried out with the computational techniques and numerical analysis of CFD on existing microalgae cultivation systems of Open Raceway Pond (ORP) with consideration of design parameters and microalgae attributes.
Projected outcomes
This ongoing research project with high anticipation of generating impactful outcomes and results would improve and optimise the cultivation system of microalgae. This would also contribute tremendously to the increased production of animal feed supplement for livestock production.