Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Human Practice/Seperation
Cell-water separation is the key of our process flow. The goal is to find a cheap, fast and most importantly moderate way that will not cause cell corruption. In this part, we combine HP work with some lab experiments in order to achieve the final goal.
Contents
Single use
Idea collecting
Right now, our algae is engineered to be used only one time.
Since all of our team members didn’t have experience in that area. We had to consult with someone familiar with this process.
In China, algae bloom is a common problem appears in lake and river. Part of the improving method is to salve the algae and concentrate its biomass for further usage. This involves cell-water separation.
Thus, we contact an expert in that area, Prof. Shengbin He from the School of Environmental Science & Engineering in our university. In our conversation, he motioned several ways of separation including sedimentation, flotation, centrifuging and membrane. However,only sedimentation and flotation might satisfy our goal.We took the idea back home and did some further studies on those two method especially.
Dissolved air flotation
Dissolved air flotation is one of the flotation methods that is frequently use in algae removal for the water supply. Based on our research, this is a developed system that has already applied in the Dian Lake and Lake Taihu in China with the maximum scale of 10000 m^3/d. Related patents have been applied, such as 200810058076.4 (Chinese potent).
Air dissolved flotation make the use of the selective adsorption of impurities at the gas/liquid or gas/solid interfaces of rising bubbles. The adsorbed impurities, which can be in soluble or insoluble form, are carried to the top of the bubble separation reactor, where they can be removed from the aqueous system (1,131,141,144).
This is an efficient and relatively cheap methods that fits our goal. However, the traditional method needs to be improve if applied in our project.
Improvement requirement
In traditional air floatation, chemicals are frequently use to coagulate the cells. Extensive cell damage and release of intracellular components can occur during floc storage and recycling, downstream of the flocculation process (Sun et al., 2013).
At first, we are afraid that this might cause the salt releasing. However, it will not be a problem as long as release of particles doesn’t occur in the flotation process itself. Further information or lab data needs to be gather in order to verify.
If it does cause trouble, the improvement that chemicals bring to this process should be not consider. Instead, different from usual cell-water separation, the cell specie in our project is single, Synechocystis sp. Strain PCC6803. The ability of PCC 6803 to rise to the surface of an open container suggests that flotation strategies can merge with air dissolved flotation well and replace the efficiency the chemical coagulation brings.
Utilization of the bio-mass
Utilization has been discussed in our safety page.
Long-term use
At first, our team didn't consider the possibility that the cell can be used multiple times since the recycling of the cells might be difficult and expensive due to the cell damage desalination process causes. After we are truly testing the genetic design, the strength of the cell is stronger than we predicted.
Thus, the immobilization of the cell has been placed into our consideration. Even though the genetic pathway of releasing the salt is too late to design. We can still try out the downstream process.
