Pretreatment of microalgae to improve biogas production: a review
2014
Passos, Fabiana | Uggetti, Enrica | Carrère, Hélène | Ferrer, Ivet | GEMMA – Group of Environmental Engineering and Microbiology, Department of Hydraulic, Maritime and Environmental Engineering ; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya = Université polytechnique de Catalogne [Barcelona] (UPC) | Laboratoire de Biotechnologie de l'Environnement [Narbonne] (LBE) ; Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier (Montpellier SupAgro) | Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BIOAL-GAS CTM2010-17846), Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personal (CAPES) from the Brazilian Ministry of Education
Microalgae have been intensively studied as a source of biomass for replacing conventional fossil fuels in the last decade. The optimization of biomass production, harvesting and downstream processing is necessary for enabling its full-scale application. Regarding biofuels, biogas production is limited by the characteristics of microalgae, in particular the complex cell wall structure of most algae species. Therefore, pretreatment methods have been investigated for microalgae cell wall disruption and biomass solubilization before undergoing anaerobic digestion. This paper summarises the state of the art of different pretreatment techniques used for improving microalgae anaerobic biodegradability. Pretreatments were divided into 4 categories: (i) thermal; (ii) mechanical; (iii) chemical and (iv) biological methods. According to experimental results, all of them are effective at increasing biomass solubilization and methane yield, pretreatment effect being species dependent. Pilot-scale research is still missing and would help evaluating the feasibility of full-scale implementation.
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