Abstract:

Recently, the concern of energy crisis and global warming thread has driven all people to develop renewable and sustainable fuels. One of considered fuels is biodiesel synthesized from microalgae. Microalgae are fast-growth micro-photosynthetic organism which can be cultivated in any medium conditions and functionalized as carbon capture. To produce biodiesel from microalgae, extractive-transesterification is promoted to extract and convert algal oil into biodiesel in a single step process, simplifying process and lowering energy requirement. The experiment was conducted in batch stirred reactor to investigate the comparison of alkaline (sodium hydroxide) vs acid (sulfuric acid) catalyst and the effect of biomass weight-solvent volume ratio (1:3, 1:5, 1:7) on biodiesel yield from microalgae Arthrospira sp. using methanol-hexane mixture as solvent at temperature of 50oC and methanol-hexane volumetric ratio of 3:7. The highest overall biodiesel yield was 13.85% w/w of dry biomass, obtained at ratio of 1:3 and under alkaline catalyst. Compared to the previous studies, extractive-transesterification using methanol-hexane mixture as solvent improved the biodiesel yield from microalgae.

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