How You Should Look For An Algal Photo Bioreactor

Posted by: Michale G. Adams  /  Category: Environment

Sustainable energy business people are now searching for the best bioreactors with the right stuff. What is the right stuff you ask? Well it must be a algae farm that meets numerous challenges: be affordable, scalable, able to manage changing climates at various customer locations.

Low Cost to Execute

The first subject of concern is definitely the cost. As with all systems of a commercial size, cost is very important. The technological innovation at this time has many faces to include row crops, big open pond systems, raceway pond systems and PBR’s. The product you choose should have nutrients to nourish the algae, water and sunshine. Your carbon dioxide inputs can be active or ambient air. Cross contamination of the algal mass is a concern, but the intended use of the algae shall be the best guide.

Continuous Harvesting

Harvesting the algae will be a issue depending on the system. It will take more effort to harvest algal biomass from an open pond process than it will from a continuous harvesting algae PBR. Constant harvesters do just that, constantly harvest algae cake, you now will only need staff to move the algal cake to the next stations for drying out and oil extraction.

Oil Removal

* There are three well-known methods to remove the oil from oilseeds, and the techniques apply equally well for algal biomass too:

1. Expeller/Press

2. Hexane chemical oil removal

3. Supercritical Fluid extraction

* Expeller/Press

* Expression/Expeller press-When algae is dried it keeps its oil content, which then can be “pressed” out with an oil press. Many industrial manufacturers of vegetable oil use a variety of mechanical pressing and chemical solvents in extracting oil.

* While better processes are emerging, an easy process is to use a press to remove a large percentage (70-75%) of the oils from algae.

* Hexane Solvent Method

* Algae oil can be removed utilizing chemical substances. Benzene and ether have been used, but a popular chemical for solvent extraction is hexane, which can be relatively inexpensive.

* Super-critical Fluid Method

* Supercritical removal involves, pressure and heat to burst open algal cell walls.

No matter what algae method you chose just make sure it meets your needs and production goals.

Algae Biofuel will play a very important part in meeting the worlds increasing energy need, Algae has a place in not just our past, but in our future too.

70CentsaGallon.com has kicked open the opportunities for Producing algae biodiesel production, Using Pbr’s look at this Algae to Biodiesel home training course… from this day on is your turn. Check here for free reprint licence: How You Should Look For An Algal Photo Bioreactor.

Imprinting Versus Learning

Posted by: Hilda Sinton  /  Category: Environment

Before the child is weaned, the mother’s whole interest is centred on him. She never leaves him, carries him on her back-often in skin-to-skin contact-wherever she goes, sleeps with him, feeds him on demand at all hours of the day and night, forbids him nothing, and never chides him. … He is, moreover, continually being stimulated by seeing her at her various occupations and hearing her interminable conversations, and because he is always with her, his world is relatively extensive. He is also the centre of interest for neighbors and visitors.

The first systematic investigations on imprinting were published in 1951. Independently, in this country and in Europe, the work of scientists gave the first indications of some of the important factors in the process. Most of Ramsay’s experiments dealt with exchange of parents and young, although he also imprinted some waterfowl on such objects as a football or a green box. . . .

Our birds (ducks and chicks) were incubated and hatched right in our laboratory. They hatched in the dark, and each animal was placed in an individual box marked with the exact hour at which the animal hatched. The bird, in the box, was kept in a still-air incubator and kept there until it was to be imprinted. After the animal had undergone the imprinting experience, it was returned to the box and kept there until testing. Only after testing was completed was the young bird placed in day light and given food and water.

Although the intensive effort to find and formulate laws of learning (in hopes of accounting for the causal bases of all behaviors) did show that certain behaviors once thought to be instinctive were indeed modifiable by learning, the realization is growing that there are still certain behaviors that are so persistent in character and resistant to modification by reinforcement that they cannot be satisfactorily explained by conventional laws of learning. In such cases, and imprinting is one of them, other explanatory devices must be constructed. He was the first to bring widespread attention to this phenomenon of imprinting, and he gave it its name. In a broad sense, imprinting refers to an early experience that has a pro found influence on the later adult social and sexual behavior of an animal with respect to the choice of objects for these behaviors.

It is well known that in discrimination learning, experience is more effective for retention of learning. In imprinting, however, primacy of experience is the maximally effective factor. This difference is demonstrated by the following experiment. Two groups of eleven ducklings each were imprinted to two different imprinting objects. Animals of Group I were first individually imprinted to a male mallard model, and then to a female model. Group II, on the other hand, was first imprinted to a female model, and subsequently to a male model. Fourteen of the twenty-two ducklings, when tested with both models present, preferred the model to which they first had been imprinted, showing primacy. Only five preferred the model to which they had been imprinted.

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How You Would Transform Algae Into Usable Bio-diesel?

Posted by: Jose Kingery  /  Category: Environment

One of the most discussed renewable fuel sources in the past handful of years has been algal biofuels. With all the world-wide efforts to cut down on our dependence on fossil fuels, algal biofuels have been showing promise on being able to scale to the quantities of production to affordably replace our dependence on traditional petroleum oil sources. Beyond the advantages of currently being renewable, algae biofuels have also shown that they’re significantly much better for the environment through the reduced quantities of Carbon Dioxide emitted at the time of their use. Biodiesel from algae is one of the alternative fuel sources being researched for potential widespread usage. To understand this we need to first answer the question of what is bio-fuel?

What Makes Up a Biofuel?

Biofuels could be in various forms to including liquid, gas, or solid materials. Biofuels are generally made from any biological carbon-based substances, with corn and soy beans being the most popular crops utilized for biodiesel manufacturing. Utilizing these crops needs the land normally used to grow food that we eat. As a result, the renewable fuels business has been investing time and effort into refining the method to extract biofuel from algal mass as a third generation biofuel.

Algae Fuel Advantages

Algae will grow at 50 to a hundred times faster than corn or soy, and don’t need freshwater or farm land to be grown. Algae can be grown in non potable water or suspended containers located where the land can not be used to develop food. The traditional barriers to effective use of algae as a biofuel has been the relative low price of oil when compared to the price of extracting the biofuel from algae, however, with enhanced technology and increased crude oil prices this gap has shrunk over the previous few years.

When developed in closed photo bioreactor systems, the algae growth process can be controlled resulting in greater yields and improve biodiesel production. Another advantage with the algae development method is the algae pulls carbon dioxide from the air and replaces it with clean oxygen. This makes bio-diesel algae farms a lot more attractive to place near industrial plants that produce extreme amounts of carbon dioxide to help decrease pollution but also benefit the algae grower.

Algae biodiesel has the potential to replace all crude oil world-wide. If algae farms can achieve their potential, then this could be completed 100 million acres in contrast it would take exponentially much more land to achieve the exact same effect with conventional biofuel crops.

How Is Oil Extracted from Algae?

Extracting the oil from algae biomass has been the major expense barrier for the growth of algae biodiesel into the industry. Once the algae are harvested, the oils are then extracted through the algae cells. The most rudimentary method to do this is to use an oil press which is similar to how an palm oil press functions. The oil press has roughly a 75 % extraction rate. Another method used to extract the oil is the hexane solvent extraction. This method results in approximately a 95 percent extraction rate of the oil from the algae.

The third method used is the supercritical fluids method which can get up to one hundred % of the algae oil out from the algae biomass. In this method, carbon dioxide is used to act as the supercritical fluid. The algae is pressurized and heated up to change it into a fluid and gaseous state. Then, the CO2 is mixed with the algae which turns it almost completely into oil. This method requires a considerable investment in equipment and incurs considerable expense. As soon as the algae oil is extracted, it is then processed making use of the transesterification method in which sodium hydroxide is mixed with ethanol to create biodiesel from algae biomass.

Algae technology has kicked open the opportunities for Producing Algae to Biodiesel, Using algae photo-bioreactors look at this Algae to Biodiesel home training course… from this day forward is your turn. This article, How You Would Transform Algae Into Usable Bio-diesel? has free reprint rights.