Makenzie Womack
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Taehoon Han
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Mechanical Engineering / Engineering
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Makenzie Womack, Taehoon Han
Abstract
As temperatures continue to rise and carbon emissions seem more and more out of control by the day the push for renewable sources of energy has increased dramatically. Algae biofuel is a promising solution on the decarbonization front because of the ease of production and the large quantities that can be produced. However, refinements to the current processes are needed in order to produce algae biofuel that meets the quality tolerances for sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). This project is working to refine the current process of biofuel production for higher quality to meet SAF standards. The current standard of biofuel production is using hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) to create biocrude from the algae and then upgrade the biocrude to biofuel using catalysts and hydrogen. However, this method of biocrude production has a number of additional, bio-derived unexpected elements like sulfur, boron, nitrogen, etc. In order to reduce unwanted elements, developing a cleaner pathway is needed which is where the lipid-extraction method is used. This process breaks the extracted lipids down into glycerol and fatty acids through transesterification in order to create n-alkane based SAF. Lipid extraction is done using a soxhlet device to evaporate the solvent which rises to a cooling coil where it then returns to a liquid state and drops into the algae. Preliminary testing was done to find the most suitable solvents which showed that n-Hexane and the Folch method, a methanol and chloroform mixture, are the most viable options. Once the algae lipids are extracted, the upgrading process will begin. This process will decarbonize the biofuel and then break the carbon chains in order to decrease the size of average carbon chains. From here, the amount of unexpected elements has been measured to determine that the lipid-extraction method produces a cleaner biofuel.
