Moorthy Raghu K, Premalatha M, Arumugam Muthu
Department of Energy and Environment, National Institute of Technology, TiruchirappalliTiruchirappalli, India.
Microbial Process and Technology Division, National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (CSIR)Trivandrum, India.
Front Chem. 2017 Jun 19;5:37. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2017.00037. eCollection 2017.
Microalga is the only feedstock that has the theoretical potential to completely replace the energy requirements derived from fossil fuels. However, commercialization of this potential source for fuel applications is hampered due to many technical challenges with harvesting of biomass being the most energy intensive process among them. The fresh water microalgal species, , has been widely recognized as a potential feedstock for production of biodiesel (Mandotra et al., 2014). The present work deals with sedimentation of algal biomass using extracted chitosan and natural bentonite clay powder as flocculant. The effect of flocculant combination and different factors such as temperature, pH, and concentration of algal biomass on sedimentation rates has been analyzed. A high flocculation efficiency of 76.22 ± 7.81% was obtained at an algal biomass concentration of 1 ± 0.05 g/L for a settling time of 1 h at 50 ± 5°C with a settling velocity of 103.2 ± 0.6 cm/h and a maximum surface conductivity of 2,260 ± 2 μS/cm using an optimal design in response surface methodology (RSM). Biopolymer flocculant such as chitosan exhibited better adsorption property along with bentonite clay powder that reduced the settling time significantly.
微藻是唯一具有理论潜力完全替代化石燃料能源需求的原料。然而，由于许多技术挑战，这种潜在的燃料应用来源的商业化受到阻碍，其中生物质收获是最耗能的过程。淡水微藻物种 ，已被广泛认为是生产生物柴油的潜在原料（曼多特拉等人，2014年）。目前的工作涉及使用提取的壳聚糖和天然膨润土粘土粉作为絮凝剂对藻类生物质进行沉降。分析了絮凝剂组合以及温度、pH值和藻类生物质浓度等不同因素对沉降速率的影响。使用响应面法（RSM）的优化设计，在藻类生物质浓度为1±0.05 g/L、沉降时间为1小时、温度为50±5°C的条件下，沉降速度为103.2±0.6 cm/h，最大表面电导率为2260±2 μS/cm，获得了76.22±7.81%的高絮凝效率。壳聚糖等生物聚合物絮凝剂与膨润土粘土粉一起表现出更好的吸附性能，显著缩短了沉降时间。
