Abstract
The development of clean and renewable biofuels has been of wide concern on the topic of energy and environmental issues. As a kind of biomass energy with great application prospects, microalgae have many advantages and are used in the fields of environmental protection and biofuels as well as food or feed production for humans and animals. However, the high cost of microalgae harvesting is the main bottleneck of industrial production on a large scale. Self-flocculation is a cost-efficient and promising method for harvesting microalgal biomass. This article briefly describes the current commonly used technology for microalgae harvesting, focusing on the research progress of self-flocculation. This article explores the relative mechanisms and influencing factors of self-flocculation and discusses a proposal for the integration of algae cultivation and harvesting as well as the co-cultivation of algae and bacteria in an effort to provide a reference for microalgae harvesting with high efficiency and low cost.
Highlights
In order to potentially apply the self-flocculation of microalgae in practice, it is necessary to study the mechanism of cell self-flocculation and important to determine the influences of various factors on this process because the flocculation efficiency of these microalgae is affected by many factors
The results showed that the flocculation effect of Tetraselmis suecica was up to 70%, while Scenedesmus obliquus reached 30% and the worst effect of Ankistrodesmus falcatus was up to 20%
Liu et al [28] developed a flocculation method to induce microalgae self-flocculation by lowering the pH just below the isoelectric point, and the flocculation efficiency was much higher than that of flocculation only by lowering the pH. This phenomenon does not belong to the mechanism of self-flocculation induced by a high pH, which can be explained as the secretion of substances with flocculating activity by microalgae, which causes dispersed algal cells to gather and form flocs
Summary
This paper starts by discussing the mechanism of self-flocculation based on the flocculation efficiency of self-flocculating algae species It analyzes the selfflocculation influencing factors and compares the advantages and disadvantages of various biological flocculation methods. It discusses the integration of algae culture and biomass collection as well as co-culture technology of algae and bacteria in order to provide a reference for follow-up research on self-flocculation.
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