Plants, algae, and some bacteria convert solar energy into chemical energy by using photosynthesis. In light of the current energy environment, many research strategies try to benefit from photosynthesis in order to generate usable photobioelectricity. Among all the strategies developed for transferring electrons from the photosynthetic chain to an outer collecting electrode, we recently implemented a method on a preparative scale (high surface electrode) based on a Chlamydomonas reinhardtii green algae suspension in the presence of exogenous quinones as redox mediators. While giving rise to an interesting performance (10–60 μA cm⁻²) in the course of one hour, this device appears to cause a slow decrease of the recorded photocurrent. In this paper, we wish to analyze and understand this gradual fall in performance in order to limit this issue in future applications. We thus first show that this kind of degradation could be related to over-irradiation conditions or side-effects of quinones depending on experimental conditions. We therefore built an empirical model involving a kinetic quenching induced by incubation with quinones, which is globally consistent with the experimental data provided by fluorescence measurements achieved after dark incubation of algae in the presence of quinones.

中文翻译：

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随着时间的流逝，对活泼的单细胞藻类与醌的悬浮液产生的光电流进行了研究†

植物，藻类和一些细菌通过光合作用将太阳能转化为化学能。鉴于当前的能源环境，许多研究策略试图从光合作用中受益以产生可用的光生物电。在为将电子从光合作用链转移到外部收集电极而开发的所有策略中，我们最近在外源性醌作为氧化还原介体存在的情况下，以莱茵衣藻绿藻悬浮液为基础，在制备规模（高表面电极）上实施了一种方法。同时产生令人感兴趣的性能（10–60μAcm ^-2）在一个小时的过程中，此设备似乎导致记录的光电流缓慢降低。在本文中，我们希望分析和理解这种性能的逐渐下降，以便在将来的应用中限制此问题。因此，我们首先表明，取决于实验条件，这种降解可能与过度辐照条件或醌的副作用有关。因此，我们建立了一个涉及通过与醌温育诱导的动力学猝灭的经验模型，该模型与在醌存在下藻类暗温培养后获得的荧光测量结果所提供的实验数据总体上是一致的。