Abstract
A major challenge in the commercialisation of biofuel from micro-algae is the reduction of the operational energy required for its production and in particular the energy used in cell harvesting and oil extraction. The use of a disc stack centrifuge to achieve a combined cell harvesting, cell disruption and oil separation process is briefly examined and discussed.
Highlights
The demand for renewable biofuels continues to grow as concerns increase about current fuel costs, dwindling fossil fuel supplies and global warming
This calculation is based on one manufacturer’s disc stack centrifuge, but the similarity in the general design of disc centrifuges and similar or higher maximum hydraulic energy dissipation rates occurring in an alternative type of centrifuge (Boychyn, et al, 2004) indicate that damage to algal cells could occur during disc stack centrifugation
Suited to the separation of the particle sizes and concentrations found in microalgal suspensions, have too high an energy consumption to be suitable for the production of algal biodiesel rather than higher value commercial algal products
Summary
The demand for renewable biofuels continues to grow as concerns increase about current fuel costs, dwindling fossil fuel supplies and global warming. Microalgal biomass cultivation for biofuel is receiving a great deal of attention as a potential source of third generation biofuels, for several reasons They can be cultivated on non-agricultural land, with many species growing in brackish or salt water. Many types of algal biofuel have been considered, including biogas, bio-hydrogen, algal fuel cells, bioethanol and direct algal biomass combustion (Benemann, 2000; Kruse & Hankamer, 2010; McKendry, 2002; Strik, Terlouw, Hamelers, &Buisman, 2008; Velasquez-Orta, Curtis, & Logan, 2009; Verma, Mehrotra, Shukla, & Mishra, 2010).The demand for liquid fuels, coupled with the potential high lipid content of some microalgal species under certain conditions, has resulted in much of the work focusing on the production of biodiesel and other liquid biofuels derived from microalgal lipids. With over 50 companies working on algal biofuels there are as yet no commercial-scale quantities or sources of algal biofuel at competitive prices and the process of producing fuel from microalgae would appear to be currently uneconomic (Milledge, 2010a; Pienkos & Darzins, 2009; St John, 2009)
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