Journal
METABOLITES
Volume 8, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/metabo8040065
Keywords
microalgae; cell disruption; ultraviolet light; biodiesel; Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; Dunaliella salina; Micractinium inermum
Categories
Funding
- Project Sunshine Centre for Doctoral Training
- EPSRC [EP/E036252/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Currently, the energy required to produce biofuel from algae is 1.38 times the energy available from the fuel. Current methods do not deliver scalable, commercially viable cell wall disruption, which creates a bottleneck on downstream processing. This is primarily due to the methods depositing energy within the water as opposed to within the algae. This study investigates ultraviolet B (UVB) as a disruption method for the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Dunaliella sauna and Micractinium inermum to enhance solvent lipid extraction. After 232 seconds of UVB exposure at 1.5 W/cm(2), cultures of C. reinhardtii (culture density 0.7 mg/mL) showed 90% disruption, measured using cell counting, correlating to an energy consumption of 5.6 MJ/L algae. Small-scale laboratory tests on C. reinhardtii showed bead beating achieving 45.3 mg/L fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) and UV irradiation achieving 79.9 mg/L (lipids solvent extracted and converted to FAME for measurement). The alga M. inermum required a larger dosage of UVB due to its thicker cell wall, achieving a FAME yield of 226 mg/L, compared with 208 mg/L for bead beating. This indicates that UV disruption had a higher efficiency when used for solvent lipid extraction. This study serves as a proof of concept for UV irradiation as a method for algal cell disruption.
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