MECHANICAL DOWNSTREAM PROCESSING OF SINGLECELL OILS

摘要

Due to the combination of a high areal productivity, a high lipid content and limited competition with food crops for agricultural land, the use of microal-gae as a source of biofuel production has gained an enormous interest (Chisti, 2008). Nowadaysmicroalgae are produced on a limited industrial scale for valuable bioproducts such as food and dietary supplements, caro-teno'ids, poly-unsaturated fatty acids and as feed in aquaculture. The traditional recovery process, including harvesting, disruption and final extraction, nowadays used in this industry, runs up to 50% of the final product costs (Sheenan et al. 1998). This process also requires a substantial energy input and often exceeds the energy content of the microalgal biomass (Pienkos and Darzins 2009, Wijffels and Barbosa 2010). Algal biofuel production will be economical feasible when lowering the costs and/or increasing the (energy) efficiency of among other things the cell harvesting method.