Lipid Science & Technology

Biography

Biography: Ho Nam Chang

Abstract

Techno-economic microbial diesel production were assessed using commercial simulation software (SuperProDesigner, Intelligen.com) in terms of raw material cost,  microbial lipid  yield over substrate (g/g), lipid content of cells, bioreactor productivity and cost of downstream processing. The simulation shows that glucose is not suitable because of its high cost. Volatile fatty acids (VFAs) derived from low cost bi omass were found to be the most suitable substrate since VFAs can be produced at lowest processing cost even from lignocellulosic biomass. For bioreactor productivity multi-stage continuous high cell density culture (MSC-HCDC) was employed, which gives high bioreactor productivity together with product titer. Current experimental product titer of 5 wt% needs to remove about 550 g water from the fermentation broth. Thermal methods require high energy consumption for simple evaporation, in terms of kwh/m3 water removal, 706 and 25 while only 4 or less is needed if osmotic pressure free (Δπ=0) reverse osmosis is used. Also experimental of biolipid production kinetics of oleaginous C. curvature will be presented. At a VFAs cost of 150$/ton (biomass cost, 75$/ton, 50% yield) microbial diesel cost is estimated to be around 1.15$/L and 0$/ton VFAs gives a much lower cost. Further improvement of cells for higher VFAs yield from biomass and microbial lipid yield, and overproduction and secretion of lipids may cut down the cost further.