¹Sagar Koirala, ¹Samman Shrestha, ¹Pawan Khapung, ¹Nawodit Kharel, ¹Sagar Thapa* and ²Assistant professor Parash Mani Timilsina*

¹Department of Biotechnology, Kantipur Valley College, Purbanchal University
²Department of Biotechnology, Kathmandu University, Nepal

*Corresponding Author: Parash Mani Timilsina, Department of Biotechnology, Kathmandu University, Nepal.

Received: September 15, 2022; Published: November 11, 2022

Abstract

Increasing use of fossils fuel is becoming a challenge to ozone layer depletion, climate change and other environment related issues. Algal biomass on other hand is a problem in water bodies like river, pond. Human activities have accelerated the rate and extent of eutrophication through both point-source discharges and non-point loadings of limiting nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, into aquatic ecosystems which leads to more photosynthesis by algae and their population to increase as a result. So the problems created by algal biomass and use of fossils fuel can be solved at a time if we could algal biomass as alternative source of energy.

There are studies demonstrating use of algal biomass for biodiesel production but production of biogas from biomass is not studied in detail. So we conducted this study to check the efficacy of algal biomass in producing biogas. Moreover we did some algal biomass pretreatment and compared data with untreated and differently pretreated sample. For biogas production substrate (algal biomass) is preferred to have lower protein content (20-25%), higher carbohydrate (40-45%) and lipid content (40-50%) and higher C:N ratio(20:1 - 30:1) which were also the feature of our sample.

We found that sample treated with autoclave technique contain optimal carbohydrate, protein and lipid (42.30%, 14.85%, 37.5% resp.) hence total biogas is also found highest (617.47 ml/g VS). While the untreated sample contain least carbohydrate, protein and lipid (18.78%, 3.15% 15% resp.); Thus total biogas is also found least (374.48 ml/g VS).

The findings also suggest that autoclave is the best method to disrupt algal cell compared to other techniques. Moreover pretreated algal biomass seems to produce more biogas than the untreated one as pretreatment causes cell lysis releasing the intracellular biomolecules which are converted to methane during anaerobic digestion.

Keywords: Eutrophication; Point Source Discharge; Non Point Loading; Pretreatment; C: N Ratio; Cell Lysis; Intracellular Biomolecules

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Citation

Citation: Parash Mani Timilsina., et al. “Enhancement of Biogas Production using Pretreated Algal Biomass".Acta Scientific Biotechnology 3.6 (2022): 13-28.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2022 Parash Mani Timilsina., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.