Green Fuel
A new breakthrough technology was developed by a domestic research team, which allows the mass cultivation of microalgae that can be used for bio-diesel production.
Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI)’s Property Science Research Team led by Lee Ju-han and Lee Hyun-wook and the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER)’s team led by Yo Yoo-kwan revealed last week that they had developed a technology that enables the mass production of water-soluble cationoid organic nano clay-titanium dioxide complexes, to be used to harvest microalgae chlorella and to efficiently destroy cells and extract the oil components.
This is the world’s first development of integrated microalgae bio-refinery processing technology, by which chlorella can be quickly harvested on a large scale, and its oil component will be easily extracted using an organic nano clay-titanium dioxide complex.
KBSI’s Lee Ju-han team developed a technology to allow the mass production of organic nano clay-titanium dioxide complexes at room temperature. Organic nano clay-titanium dioxide complexes is a core material for integrated microalgae refinery processing technology.
KIER’s team discovered a processing technology that could speed up the commercialization of bio-refinery processing by applying the organic nano clay-titanium dioxide complexes into the base downstream process.
Lee said, “The technology applies sunlight usable titanium dioxide into green algae harvests, and by developing technology that can easily destroy green algae’s cellular walls, further applications are feasible such as water processing, including green algae manipulation.”