Wednesday 9 December 2015 at 3:00pm
Title: “Applications of Magnetophoresis and Reactive Electrochemical Membrane Filtration for Algal Harvesting, Destabilization and Pretreatment for Lipid Extraction”
Speaker:
Dr. Wen Zhang, Director of the Environmental Engineering Teaching Laboratory, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Abstract:
Developing sustainable and efficient membrane filtration technologies is not only critical for safe drinking water supply but also important for biomass separation for algal biofuel production. Most traditional biomass separation processes such as coagulation and membrane filtration faces major challenges in separation efficiency and energy consumption. This presentation will briefly introduce our early study of heteroaggregation between magnetic magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs) coated with a cationic polymer, polyethylenimine (PEI), and model algae, Scenedesmus dimorphus, for efficient algal harvesting and potential algal cell oxidation for lipid extraction. Then, the speaker will focus on an innovative and multifunctional reactive electrochemical membrane (REM), Ti4O7, which could act as a model filtration membrane (see schematics below) with great antifouling characteristics and strong surface reactivity. The results presented in this work particularly demonstrated the algal integrity changes with exposure to the REM and positive impacts on lipid extraction. The application of a direct current (DC) generated reactive species at the REM surface that could oxidize algae and soluble organic compounds. Algal integrity changes with exposure to the REM included deformation, photosynthetic activity and released intracellular organics. Moreover, additional benefits of REM such as the reduced membrane fouling potential, reduction of organic (toxic) solvent and energy consumption for downstream lipid processing, and removal of aqueous algal growth inhibitors that enables water and nutrient reuse of algal media may largely offset the associated costs, which deserves more efforts to verify. Overall, REM as a novel membrane filtration process holds great potential in efficient biomass separation, reduction of membrane fouling, biomass oxidation, ease of scaling up at industrial applications.
Host: Dr. Yantao Li, Ph.D.