Background: Microalgae has been concerned as a potential source of biodiesel in the recent years. However, it is costly to harvest microalgae as it is commonly cultured in water and the cells are too small to harvest. In order to reduce the cost of cultivation and harvesting, it is important to improve the biomass productivity of microalgae. Here, we utilized the attachment method to culture microalgae to cut off the cost of culture and harvest.
Results: In this paper, various supporting surface with different hydrophility including polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), polyacrylonitrile (PAN), polysulfone (PS), which are not easy to be degraded in the culture medium, were used for microalgae culture by the attachment method. The results showed that PVDF supporting cloth was suitable for the algae growth, and its average biomass productivity was to 4.0 g/m2/day. Furthermore, a series of PVDF concentrations were tested, and cloth treated with 3% or 5% PVDF solution was better for the algae culture. In addition, Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) with different molecular weight was added to the PVDF solution as porogens to produce rough surface. And the addition of PVP resulted in better growth with 6.0 g/m2/day of average biomass productivity.
Conclusion: This attachment method makes the harvest of microalgae easy and energy-saving, because the microalgae grow on the supporting material and is easy to be scraped. The results indicate that the PVDF-treated cloth is a potential alternative for the microalgae attachment culture.