Our Facilities
Located adjacent to a Grade II-listed building and the botanical gardens of the Singleton campus, our greenhouse facilities combine aesthetics with year-round algal biomass production and processing technologies.
Additionally, we have 30 microalgal marine/freshwater species in a collection ready to be used in high scale cultivation. Our nearby Wallace laboratories contain state-of-the-art equipment for analytical chemistry, molecular techniques and robotics for high-throughput screening. See also the CSAR website.
Large-scale cultivation and downstream processing
Our greenhouse facilities house several vertical and horizontal tubular photobioreactors (PBRs) providing 10,000L capacity for growth under contained conditions. Our biomass productivity is typically 160 g dry weight per 1,000L per day for fast growing algal strains. For the more robust strains such as Spirulina, we have three 1,000L capacity raceway ponds. Additionally, we have a satellite algal cultivation facility (with 1,000 raceway pond and 400L tubular PBR, placed at the industrial Bluestone brewery location, to be used for Carbon capture and CO2 remediation after the beer fermentation process. For the downstream processing we have several microfiltration units, connected to the continuous flow centrifuges and industrial freeze-dryer and a high-pressure homogeniser.
High throughput-screening for algal products
We can rapidly evaluate high-value products from multiple algal species using recently acquired equipment: ROTOR+ high-throughput screening robot (Singer Instruments) followed by downstream analysis on analytical/preparative HPLC coupled with DAD-MS, and UHPLC-HRMSHPLC mass spectral analytics. We also have access to GC-FID/MS equipment and a bomb calorimeter plus a fast-repetition-rate-fluorometer for evaluating algal productivity.
