Dewatering of microalgae suspension using air-sparged ultrafiltration

Dewatering is one of the bottlenecks in microalgae-based biofuel production. Ultrafiltration is a scalable and chemical additive-free dewatering technique. In this paper, we examine air-sparging for mitigating the problem of microalgae cake formation during ultrafiltration. The extent of cake formation was assessed and its detrimental effect on filtration performance was quantified. Our results indicated that microalgae cake-layer formation …