Biodiesel is a renewable energy source that can be used as a drop-in fuel supplement and replacement for petroleum diesel. Though many biodiesel production facilities have been constructed, increases in the cost of the feedstock oil (such as soy oil), from which some biodiesel is made, have created a significant market need for a low-cost oil alternative that is suitable for biodiesel production. This team plans to meet this need by using oil extracted from algae. Algae are small photosynthetic microorganisms which convert sunlight into oil and other high-value products. Algae can produce more oil per acre than any other conventional biodiesel feedstock and does not compete with food production. Though others have looked into producing algae oil on a large scale, their efforts were largely unsuccessful due to processing costs when extracting oil from algae. This team has developed a technology to extract oil from algae at a low cost.
The proposed innovation is a novel technique to rupture and extract oil from algae cells that has widespread application to the dairy/food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. The technology uses knowledge about the biomechanical response of algae cells which is input into an in-house computational framework that optimizes the design of our system to extract oil from algae. The oil will then be used as a feedstock for biodiesel production. The technology can also be used as a low-energy homogenization device which can serve the dairy/food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. The proposed project is transformative as the approach described in this proposal aims to revolutionize algal oil extraction based on first-principles understanding of fluid mechanics, cellular mechanics, and particle-fluid interactions.
