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[APD] Re: Aquatic-Plants Digest, Vol 1, Issue 36



A further point is that most of the CO2 "usage" in the tank is diffusion to the
atmosphere, especially at higher concentrations. I can't venture a guess on
exact ratios, but I would conjecture that _most_ of the CO2 we inject does not
get used by the plants. This implies that when you turn on the CO2 in the
morning, a lot of incoming CO2 is lost right away and it takes longer than you
think to get to useful concentrations.

George,


I had this same thought the other day... we are most likely pumping a ton of CO2 into the tank only to see most outgas. I could not find anywhere on the internet carbon content of plants on a dry or wet weight basis, but that would give us our answer. For example, let's say plants are 50% carbon on a dry weight basis (made this up), this would mean my tank would need to produce 10 lbs of dry plant weight over the lifetime of a 5lb cylinder... for those that think they get this level of production, allow your plants to dry and see how light they actually are with all that water removed.... I think CO2 efficiency is something near 1% or less (guestimate) but I would like to update these numbers if anyone knows any different?

----------------------------------------------------------
Jeffery J Ludwig			ludwig at che_udel.edu
Graduate Student			ph: (302) 831-8705
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716

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