(589f) Evaluation of Optimum Cell Disruption for Microbial Lipid Extraction Using High Pressure CO2

The economy of lipid extraction from non-food sources of triglycerides (e.g. microbial oil) depends on lipid extraction and feedstock cost. Lipid can be extracted either from dried biomass (needs drying of the biomass up to 95%) or from wet biomass (consists mostly moisture). The microbial lipid extraction from wet biomass has advantages over dried biomass due to the elimination of energy intensive drying process. To improve lipid recovery from wet biomass, the cell wall of the microbes needs to be disrupted prior to lipid extraction for releasing the intracellular lipid from microbes that is usually difficult to extract using traditional solvent extraction process. The cell disruption is found to be affected by applied gas pressure, temperature, exposure time, depressurization rate, agitation, etc. This research will investigate the effect of different factors that affect the microbial cell disruption using high pressure CO₂. A fractional factorial design of experiment will be used to evaluate the controlling factors in microbial cell disruption. The number of cells before and after the treatment will be used as a response variable. After evaluating the main factors, a central composite design will be used to find the optimum cell disruption using a response surface methodology.