Journal of Fundamentals of Renewable Energy and Applications
Open Access
ISSN: 2090-4541
ISSN: 2090-4541
Abu Yousuf, M Amirul Islam, Maksudur Rahman Khan, Zularisam Ab Wahid and Domenico Pirozzi
University Malaysia Pahang, Malaysia
University Naples Federico II, Italy
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Fundam Renewable Energy App
Traditional biodiesel feedstock like edible oils or plant oils, animal fats and cooking waste oil have been replaced by microbial oil in recent research of biodiesel synthesis. The well-known community of microbial oil producers includes microalgae, oleaginous yeast and seaweeds. Old-style transesterification of microbial oil to produce biodiesel is lethargic, energy consuming, cost-ineffective and environmentally unhealthy. This process follows several steps such as microbial biomass drying, cell disruption, oil extraction, solvent recovery, oil separation and transesterification. Therefore, direct transesterification or single- pot biodiesel synthesis has been studying for last few years. It combines all the steps in a single pot and it eliminates the steps of biomass drying, oil extraction and separation from solvent. Apparently, it seems to be cost-effective and faster process, but number of difficulties need to be solved to make it large scale applicable. The main challenges are microbial cell disruption in bulk volume and to make the esterification reaction faster, because water contents of the medium will make the reaction rate sluggish. Several methods have been proposed but none of them is up to the level to implement in large scale. This study describes the limitation of the existing techniques and suggests a new method to make sustainable the single ��?pot transesterification of microbial oils and that is the electroporation-embedded reactor. In this method, high intensive electric pulse is used to disrupt the cell wall, even though the volume is bulk and comprise water, it is supposed to overcome the existing limitations.
Email: ayousufcep@yahoo.com