BIO-DIESEL PRODUCTION FROM MICROALGA CHLORELLA MINUTISSIMA & FAME ANALYSIS BY GC-MS

Abstract

Microalgae has been considered as best feedstock for the production of biofuels such as bioethanol, biodiesel, bio-hydrogen, etc. Production of biofuel from microalgae is considered as a very important potential process to mitigate the demand of future energy as microalgae can be cultivated year by year. But biofuel such as biodiesel production from microalgae comprised of many steps and considered as multistep process and also previous literature has reported range of methods for each step. Previous studies concluded that no single method for a single step is universal for all micro-algae as there is a difference in the size and cell wall compositions of micro-algae. This gap provides an opportunity to do the research in the area of process optimisation. In this study, biodiesel production from the microalga Chlorella minutissima has been worked out thoroughly and tried to identify potential method of each stage. Focus has been done on the identification of potential biomass yielding culture conditions, evaluation of different harvesting methods, estimation of best cell disruption method, assessment of combination and ratio of high lipid yielding organic solvents, identification of potential lipid yielding culture conditions and fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) analysis of potential lipid yielding algal biomass by GC-MS. Parameter-wise potential culture conditions have been identified. Flocculation with aluminium sulfate, cell disruption with sonication, lipid extraction with the organic solvent combination of chloroform and methanol in 1:1 were found potential methods of their respective stage. With the help of these potential methods, biomass of 66 culture conditions has been processed and maximum lipid was obtained with the culture condition of carbon concentration at 1.25 g/l. Top three lipid yielding culture conditions have been further used for fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) analysis by GC-MS to get the details of their respective FAME profile. FAME analysis concluded that this microalga is rich in fatty acids of C16 to C18 so it can be a good source of bio-diesel production.