One-pot processes for the recovery of lipid from concentrated Chlorella sp. ABC-001 cells

Abstract

Microalgae is considered as an alternative energy source for fossil fuels because of its high lipid productivity on areal basis and unlimited production of energy source. In the process of converting microalgae into biofuels, extraction process of lipid, which is the source of biofuels, has been actively studied. However, the lipid existing extraction processes have consisted of two steps, the cell disruption process and the lipid recovery process, requiring complex process, longer treatment time, high energy consumption and solvent usages. To overcome these problems, the conventional two-step extraction process was reduced to one-step or one-pot process which was developed and optimized to extract lipid from the highly concentrated wet Chlorella sp. ABC-001 in this paper. High shear-assisted solvent extraction of lipid was compared with simultaneous hydrothermal treatment and solvent extraction of lipid. It was observed that high shear-assisted solvent extraction of lipid was superior to simultaneous hydrothermal treatment and solvent extraction of lipid in lipid extraction yield, but solvent extraction of lipid at high temperature used less solvent and energy than solvent extraction of lipid by using a high-shear mixer. For future work, development of high shear-assisted solvent extraction of lipid at high temperature is expected to reduce extraction time and energy consumption.