RESUMO
Municipal wastewater sludge is a promising lipid feedstock for biodiesel production, but the need to eliminate the high water content before lipid extraction is the main limitation for scaling up. This study evaluates the economic feasibility of biodiesel production directly from liquid primary sludge based on experimental data at laboratory scale. Computational tools were used for the modelling of the process scale-up and the different configurations of lipid extraction to optimise this step, as it is the most expensive. The operational variables with a major influence in the cost were the extraction time and the amount of solvent. The optimised extraction process had a break-even price of biodiesel of 1232 $/t, being economically competitive with the current cost of fossil diesel. The proposed biodiesel production process from waste sludge eliminates the expensive step of sludge drying, lowering the biodiesel price.
Assuntos
Biocombustíveis/economia , Eliminação de Resíduos Líquidos/economia , Comércio , Análise Custo-Benefício , Lipídeos/isolamento & purificação , Modelos Econômicos , Modelos Teóricos , Esgotos , Solventes , Eliminação de Resíduos Líquidos/métodos , Águas Residuárias , Água/análiseRESUMO
Microalgae oil has been identified as a reliable resource for biodiesel production due to its high lipid productivity and potential cultivation in non-fertile locations. However, high scale production of microalgae based biodiesel depends on the optimization of the entire process to be economically feasible. The selected strain, medium, harvesting methods, etc., sorely affects the ash content in the dry biomass which have a direct effect in the lipid content. Moreover, the suitable lipids for biodiesel production, some of the neutral/saponifiable, are only a fraction of the total ones (around 30% dry base biomass in the best case). The present work uses computational tools for the modeling of different scenarios of the harvesting, oil extraction and transesterification. This rigorous modeling approach detects process bottlenecks that could have led to an overestimation of the potentiality of the microalgae lipids as a resource for the biodiesel production.
