Abstract
This study investigated the effect of enzymatic and hydrothermal pretreatment approaches on the solubilization of organic matter, structure, and biogas yield from microalgal biomass. The soluble chemical oxygen demand (sCOD) concentration increased by 1.21–3.30- and 5.54–6.60-fold compared to control by enzymatic and hydrothermal pretreatments respectively. The hydrothermal pretreatment affected the structural changes in the microalgal biomass markedly; nonetheless, increased enzymatic concentration also had a definite effect on it as determined by qualitative approaches like scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Also, the hydrothermal pretreatment (100 °C for 30 min) resulted in the highest biogas production potential (P) of 765.37 mLg−1 VS at a maximum biogas production rate (Rm) of 22.66 mLg−1 day−1 with a very short lag phase (λ) of 0.07 days. The biogas production of pretreated microalgal biomass particularly at higher enzyme dose (20%, 24 h) and higher hydrothermal pretreatment temperature (120 °C, 30 min) showed a significant but weak correlation (R = 0.53) with sCOD, thus demonstrating that the less organic matter was used up for the biogas production. The modified Gompertz model explained the anaerobic digestion of microalgal biomass more accurately and had a better fit to the experimental data comparatively because of the low root mean square error (3.259–16.728), residual sum of squares (78.887–177.025), and Akaike’s Information Criterion (38.605–62.853).
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The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India, is thankfully acknowledged for providing fellowship to the author Rouf Ahmad Dar under Grant No. 1/3/JRF-2015 (2)/HRD.
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The authors Rouf Ahmad Dar and Urmila Gupta Phutela conceptualized and designed the study. Material preparation, experimentation, investigation, data collection, data validation, and formal analysis was performed by Rouf Ahmad Dar. Rouf Ahmad Dar wrote the first draft of the manuscript and both authors reviewed and edited the manuscript. Urmila Gupta Phutela also contributed to the supervision of the work. The final manuscript was read and approved by all the authors.
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Dar, R.A., Phutela, U.G. Improvement of Asterarcys quadricellulare biomass solubilization and subsequent biogas production via pretreatment approaches: structural changes and kinetic modeling evaluation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 58450–58465 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-26555-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-26555-8