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Intervention of microfluidics in biofuel and bioenergy sectors: Technological considerations and future prospects


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Category
Articles
Publisher
Elsevier
Publishing Date
01-Mar-2019
volume
101
Issue
3
Pages
548-558

Biofuels/Bioenergy is renewable in nature by mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions despite rapid economic growth and energy demand. Biodiesel and bioethanol production from renewable sources are gaining much attention but unable to translate the technologies into commercial ventures. Several technical challenges like the screening of algae/yeast for higher lipid accumulation/ethanol production, separation and purification of microalgae from contaminants, harvesting of microalgae, improving transesterification efficiency with meager solvent consumption, energy and time have been addressed using microfluidic devices. Besides, it has shown promising results in the microbial fuel cell domain. Microfluidics and microreactors offer miniaturization of experiments by a very little expense of solvents, energy and time with higher precision results. Moreover, it provides 19.2% higher surface to volume ratio when compared with Petri dish (35?mm diameter) and microchannel (50?µm tall, 50?µm wide, and 30?mm long). Higher surface to volume ratio is helpful in the integration of the whole laboratory (i.e., lab-on-a-chip), where efficient screening of ethanol/lipid producer, higher transesterification efficiency could be ascertained. Due to the overwhelming potential of microfluidics in biofuel and bioenergy sectors, the present review article illustrated several examples to depict the importance of microfluidics towards high-throughput analysis of screening the potent microbial/microalgal strain, fabrication of microfluidic bioreactor, quality analysis of biofuel and bioenergy products.

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