Microbial cells or microorganisms are grown in bioreactors under conditions where they thrive and flourish, yielding a wide range of desired end products. Yeast, Bacteria and Algae are some of the most widely explored microorganisms and have been applied for food, water remediation and biofuel production. After the appropriate number of generations, the mature cell mass is separated from the spent liquid, then delivered as liquid cream, filtered, and sold as compressed forms or filtered and dried into instant dry cells. On occasions when a heterogeneous community is cultured, selective harvesting can possibly be employed to recover only the desired organism(s). The conventional approach to extracting cells from their growth medium is by centrifugation and filtration. However, these methods are expensive and often unsuitable for continuous large-scale production. Conversely, traditional flotation separation techniques (such as Dissolved Air Flotation) are regarded as both intrusive and energy intensive, and are only naturally suitable for portable water treatment. Our microflotation technique is advantageous due to its laminar flow process, its non-intrusiveness, and scalability to meet continuous industrial production requirements. The efficacy of microflotation has been demonstrated for algal biomass recovery, as well as for yeast, showing optimum recovery rates comparable to ideal flotation separation results.

Microflotation for microorganism harvest

246th National Meeting (2013)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.