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Generation and Harvesting of Microalgae Biomass for Biofuel Production

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Prospects and Challenges in Algal Biotechnology

Abstract

Microalgae are considered one of the promising and favorable feedstocks for biofuel production and suggested as potential natural sources of functional ingredients of food and pharmaceuticals. However, currently available energy-intensive harvesting strategies have been considered as major bottlenecks of microalgal industry for economic production of fuels and value-added products. Harvesting by centrifugation and filtration are generally characterized as high cost and energy capture method which comprises above 20% of total production cost in algae industry. Flocculation is accounted as most economically competitive and effective approach for microalgal biomass harvest at large scales compared to other access methods. In this chapter, we present various microalgal harvesting technologies with a focus on environment gracious bioflocculation methods. This is practically true that, harvesting of microalgae through the bioflocculation does not involve much capital investment, and moreover, energy consumption associated with the bioflocculation process is negligible, thus having a key position to reduce the production cost, but paradoxically are less studied than the other chemical and physical flocculation. This chapter also provided the new idea of infochemical-based flocculation and information about the future promising genetic modified microalgae with flocculation phenotype to harvest microalgae cells from culture medium. In addition, the concise overview of the mechanism behind these technologies and their possible solution for overcoming the existing challenges to improve the efficiencies of flocculation was highlighted.

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Acknowledgements

We thank NSFC International (Regional) Cooperation and Exchange Project for Young Scientist (Project No. 21650110457), National Natural Science Foundation for research team of Guangdong, China (Grant No. 2016A030312007), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 51476177 and 31070441) for funding support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Renewable Energy, Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510640, People’s Republic of China

    Md. Asraful Alam, Zhongming Wang & Zhenhong Yuan

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  1. Md. Asraful Alam
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  2. Zhongming Wang
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  3. Zhenhong Yuan
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Correspondence to Md. Asraful Alam .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak, India

    Bhumi Nath Tripathi

  2. Department of Botany, School of Life Sciences, H.N.B. Garhwal University, Srinagar-Garhwal, Uttarakhand, India

    Dhananjay Kumar

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Alam, M.A., Wang, Z., Yuan, Z. (2017). Generation and Harvesting of Microalgae Biomass for Biofuel Production. In: Tripathi, B., Kumar, D. (eds) Prospects and Challenges in Algal Biotechnology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1950-0_3

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