Multistage wet lipid extraction from fresh water stressed Neochloris oleoabundans slurry – Experiments and modelling

Algae are considered an important renewable feedstock for lipid extraction to produce biofuels. Algae strain Neochloris oleoabundans used in this research can yield a high lipid content under stressed conditions. N-ethyl butylamine (EBA) as a switchable solvent has previously shown outstanding performance on energy efficient lipid extraction from non-broken wet algae slurry. In this work, a model was developed that describes the equilibrium state of lipid extraction from fresh water (FW)-stressed Neochloris oleoabundans algae slurry using EBA as solvent. When assuming that the cell interior is almost completely filled with the solvent phase during extraction, the model estimated extraction yields showed good agreement with those obtained in experiments. The developed model can predict the amount of crude lipid being recovered from any stage of a multistage extraction process

Intrinsic Continuous Process Safeguarding Revisited for Batch Reactions

Intrinsic continuous process safeguarding (ICPS) is a methodology to substantially improve the process safety of chemical reactions. It was proposed in 1985. The origin of the method is explained in Control of a Potential Undesired Reaction. Two serious events that occurred with chemical reactors between 2000 and 2020 were selected from the databases of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (USA) and the European Major Accident Reporting System (eMARS). The occurrence of these events could have been prevented or their effects could have been mitigated if the principles of ICPS had been applied.</p

Microalgae wet extraction using N-ethyl butylamine for fatty acid production

AbstractMicroalgae are considered a promising feedstock for the production of food ingredients, cosmetics, pharmaceutical products and biofuels. The energy intensity of drying and cell breaking of algae and solvent recovery afterwards hindered the route of algae biorefinery. In this work the influences of freeze drying and cell breaking to the extraction efficiency of crude lipid yield and fatty acid yield were investigated. Results showed that drying and cell breaking are not necessary for N-ethyl butylamine extraction, because good yields were obtained without. Crude lipid yield and fatty acid yield using N-ethyl butylamine were comparable with Bligh & Dyer extraction, making N-ethyl butylamine a candidate for further development of an energy efficient lipid extraction technology for non-broken microalgae

Pyrolysis of plastic waste: effect of feedstock pretreatment and fate of contaminants

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Furfural to Cyclopentanone – a Search for Putative Oligomeric By-products

We report here on the reductive rearrangement of biomass-derived furfural to cyclopentanone, a promising non-fossil feedstock for fuels and chemicals. An underreported aspect of this reaction is the inevitable formation of heavy byproducts. To mitigate its formation, process condition such as, solvent, catalyst, temperature, acidity, and feed concentration were varied to unravel the chemistry and improve the reaction performance. Water medium was confirmed to play a crucial role, as organic solvents were unable to deliver cyclopentanone or heavy by products. Copper-based catalyst showed the highest selectivity for ring-rearrangement, reaching 50 mol % under the conditions investigated. The main factor influencing the yields of cyclopentanone (CPO), and promote oligomer formation, are the feed concentration and the pH, as high feed concentrations and high acidity facilitate the self-polymerization of furfuryl alcohol (FALC). This was confirmed by dedicated experiments using FALC and the hydroxypentenone intermediate as feed. The concentration challenge could be mitigated by slowly dosing the feed, which increased the desired product yields by 4–12 mol %. Nevertheless, most oligomers appeared to fall in the range of common liquid fuels and could be converted to diesel by hydrodeoxygenation.</p

Analysis of the energy consumption of supercritical water desalination (SCWD)

An experimental and modelling study was done to investigate supercritical water desalination (SCWD) with respect to energy consumption as a function of the NaCl concentration (0 to 20 wt%). Pilot plant experiments were performed for different flow rates and feed concentrations, and used for the validation of the thermodynamic models (eNRTL and Anderko & Pitzer) employed for phase equilibria and enthalpy calculations. Experimental and modelling results showed that the lowered heat capacity of the feed streams, while increasing the concentration from 0 to 7 wt%, leads to improved performance of the feed - supercritical water (SCW) heat exchanger (HEX), evident from a higher feed outlet temperature. For concentrations of ≥14 wt%, pre-heating of the feed, prior to the HEX, is recommended due to the decrease in the SCW recovery in the SCW-brine separator. The calculated duty, of the heater bringing the heat-exchanged feed to the separation temperature, decreases with NaCl concentration due to the decrease in the feed heat capacity. The calculated overall energy consumption of SCWD was between 0.71 and 0.90 MJth/kgfeed. For higher concentration feeds, the energy input is divided between low – and high quality (temperature) heat