1. Innovative soft separation of microalgae
Authors Catalina Suarez, Giuseppe Olivieri, Michel Eppink and Rene H. Wijffels
Wageningen UR, Bioprocess Engineering, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Besides the potential in biodiesel production, microalgae biomass has other valuable components including; carbohydrates, long chain fatty acids, pigments and proteins. For biorefinery applications of microalgae biomass, components have to be released from the cells and separated from each other.
Operation parameters
Steam inlet pressure
Feed flow rate
Feed temperature
Biomass concentration
Evaluated on:
Cell disintegration
Protein release
Pigment release
Lipids
Sugars
Conductivity
Lipids
Proteins
Sugars
Extraction: Aqueous two phase extraction (ATPE)
ATPE is going to be explored, taking into account the benefits and side-effects of using novel ionic liquids, to take the valuable biomolecules out of algae extracts. The main challenge is to maintain the functionality of the separated compounds.
Objective
Develop mild separation processes to obtain more valuable biomolecules. Furthermore, these processes should be applicable to a variety of feedstock, easily scalable, inexpensive and consume low energy. This research focusses on cell disruption and extraction technologies.
Harvesting
Supersonic Fluid Flow
Cell disruption
Aqueous two- phase
Selective Extraction
Fractionation
First a screening of different aqueous two phase systems (ATPSs) for the separation of hydrophobic from hydrophilic components will be completed. These ATPSs will be separately evaluated for the separation of model compounds. The second step is to apply the best ATPS to disrupted cells.
Cell Disruption: Supersonic Fluid Flow (SSFF)
Polymer-Salt
Proteins
Lipids
Pigments
Ionic Liquid-Salt
Polymer-Ionic Liquid
Cell disruption is applied to release biological molecules from inside the cells. Traditional methods aggressively disrupt the cells or can recover only one product. In the SSFF steam pulses are used to disrupt the cells in a softer way, keeping the functionality of all the components.
Acknowledgements
The AlgaePARC Biorefinery program has been initiated by Wageningen University and Research Centre in cooperation with eleven industrial partners and University Twente. The program is performed with financial support from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Economic Affairs in the framework of the TKI BioBased Economy under contract nr. TKIBE01009.
Wageningen UR (University and Research centre)
P.O. Box 123, 6700 AB Wageningen
Contact:
T + 31 (0)