earticle

영어

Recovery of microalgal biomass and dewatering are major obstructions to commercial production of microalgae for biofuel such as biodiesel. The diluted broth of harvested microalgal cultures causes a huge operational cost during recovery and dewatering process. Recovery of biomass and dewatering process requires several solid-liquid separation steps. Since the broth of microalgae culture was generally dilute, it needs to remove large volume of water from the broth. Hence, the downstream recovery process of microalgal biomass can be more expensive than the large scale cultivation process. In most cases, many harvest methods were used and claimed to contribute 20-30% to the total cost of biomass production. In this study, we used membrane filtration method for removal of water from cultivated broth of microalgae. Osmotic pressure is a natural equilibrium process and is the main driving force of this method to make the stream of water throughout the membrane. Water passes from broth of microalgae culture to outside by diffusion effect until the salt concentration on both sides of the membrane are equal.