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MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING BY A SIMPLE SOLAR

DEVICE∗
a b a b b
J. PRAKASH , B. PUSHPARAJ , P. CARLOZZI , G. TORZILLO , E. MONTAINI & R.
b
MATERASSI
a
Department of Physics, Ramjas College, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110009, India
b
Centro di Studio dei Microrganismi Autotrofi C. N. R. Piazzale delle Cascine-27, Firenze,
50144, Italy
Published online: 25 Apr 2007.

To cite this article: J. PRAKASH , B. PUSHPARAJ , P. CARLOZZI , G. TORZILLO , E. MONTAINI & R. MATERASSI (1997):
MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING BY A SIMPLE SOLAR DEVICE∗, International Journal of Solar Energy, 18:4, 303-311

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MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING BY

A SIMPLE SOLAR DEVICE*
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J. P R A K A S H ~ ! B.
~ , PUSHPARAJ~,P. CARLOZZI,
G . TORZILLO~,E. MONTAINI and R. MATERASSI~
aDepartrnent of Physics, Rarnjas College, University of Delhi, Delhi-110009, India,
bCentro di Studio dei Microrganisrni Autotrofi C. A! R. Piazzaledelle Cascine-27
50144-Firenze, Italy

(Received19 Ocrober 1995; Infinalform 26 January 1996)

An inexpensive and simple solar device was constructed and monitored for drying microalgal bio-
mass with 90% moisture content. The drier is capable of producing about 140 g dry biomass per
sq.m ofcollector area in 3-5 hours.The dried biomass contains less than 10% moisture and is bio-
logically of good quality. The experiments are done with two microalgae - Spirulina and
Scenedesmus.

Keywords: Solar drier; Solar energy; Spirulina; Scenedesmus; Microalgae; Algal biomass

INTRODUCTION

It is well known that the efficiency of bioconversion of solar energy in micro-

algal cultivation is at least an order higher as compared to that in conventional
agriculture. But the economic viability of microalgal cultivation for harnessing
solar energy under the present state ofart is not without doubt. The major fac-
tor influencing the cost of marketable algal biomass are low productivity rate,
the high costs of input nutrients, and the cost of maintaining optimal ambient
conditions.The economics of biomass utilization is made even more unfavour-
able by the high cost of harvesting. It is estimated (Becker, 1980; Richmond,

The work was supported by a grant from ICTP Programme forTraining and Research in
Italian Laboratories - 1991,Trieste, Italy.
t Corresponding author.
 304 J. PRAKASH er a/.

1987) that centrifugation and drying alone account for 25-30% of the total
production cost. However, there seems to be a possibility of reducing drying
cost if a suitable technology is employed.
There have been five main techniques in use for algal biomass drying. These
are: (i) spray fed electrically heated single drum drying; (ii) steam heated dou-
ble drum drying; (iii) low pressure shelf drying; (iv) spray drying; and (v) sun
drying. Most of the workers employ drum drying due to convenience and de-
pendability in spite of its high capital and operational cost.
Sun dryingof algae has been practised by local populations of African coun-
tries for making dry cakes called "Dihe" (Ciferri, 1983) and by Maya tribes in
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Mexico for making "Tecuitlatl" (Furst, 1981) from ancient times. In the recent
past some workers (Lincoln, 1980; Venkataraman et al., 1980) have used sun
drying to varying degree of success. It is difficult to maintain the quality of the
end product suitable for human consumption with traditional open sun drying
methods. Besides other factors, the slow drying rate due to low temperature is
the main cause of biomass degradation and consequential rise in bacterial .
count. But in a closed solar device high temperature and thereby high rate of
drying may produce a good quality dry biomass. The cost of drying algal bio-
mass by solar energy is much less as compared to any of the other methods.
In the present paper we report the performance studies of a simple solar
biomass drier constructed by us for drying algal and cyanobacterial biomass.
The studies were also made to select the material of the containers used for dry-
ing the slurry in the solar device. This design of the solar drier has the charac-
teristics oflow capital and operational costs, easy fabrication, high chamber air
temperature and good ventilation for moisture removal.

DESCRIPTION OF THE SOLAR DRIER

The device is broadly based on the cabinet type design for solar drying and is
schematically shown in Fig. 1. A general view of the drying device is also shown
in Fig. 2. It uses both direct drying as well as indirect drying. The device con-
sists of a 1.8 m2 flat d a t e collector area. This collector is assembled in the
laboratory using a 2cm thick polyurethane with its top coated with a black
sheet (commercially called Stiferite in Italy and is available at 5-6 US $ per
sq.rn). The top black sheet serves as a black absorbing surface for solar
radiation while the rest of the polyurethane material serves as an insulator
to reduce thermal losses from the bottom. The polyurethane is covered by a
two layer plexiglass panel (called Alveoler sheet and is available at 15 US $
per sq.m) having channels (1.2cm x 3cm) along the length for air flow. A
 MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING
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FIGURE 1 A schematic representationof thesolar drier.

2cm spacing between the black absorbing surface of the thermocole and the
glazing is maintained for air flow. The air passes through the channels in the
two layers of the glazing and between the black surface and the glazing. The
flat plate collector thus acts like a two pass solar air heater. The cold air
enters at the inlet as shown in the figure and passes through the solar panel
collecting thermal energy both from the black absorbing surface and the
lower plexiglass layer of the glazing and this hot air enters at the bottom of a
drying chamber. The flat plate collector is oriented towards south and is
inclined at an angle of 15" from the horizontal. This inclination is slightly
less than the optimal value for the maximum solar gain in the summer
months. This slight variation from the optimum slope does not affect the
solar radiation input in summer months as the geometric factor (the ratio of
beam radiation on the tilted surface to that on a horizontal surface) for
inclinations within 10" of the optimal value at any time of the day during
summer is nearly equal to one. However, this inclination is sufficient to
create a pressure head good enough for the swift movement of air from the
collector input to collector output.
The drying chamber is like a cabinet (1 m x 0.5 m x 1m) and its structure is
made of 2.5 cm thickcompressed particle board. The south wall and the top are
made from 5 mm thick glass to receive direct solar radiation. The walls on
the east and the west are provided with doors for loading and unloading
drier with biomass. The chamber has 6 shelves for keeping biomass slurry.
These are made of aluminium L-sections and T-sections. The shelves
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 MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING 307

are separated from each other by 10 cm distance. The shelves are covered with
black plastic nets (pore size 1x 2 mm) for uniform distribution ofhot air inside
the drying chamber.The channels in the shelves are designed to hold the trays
carrying biomass slurry. On the top is provided a 30cm high chimney of
10 x 10 cm cross-section. A 10 cm diameter exhaust fan is fitted in the chimney.
The aim of fixing the exhaust fan on the outlet side is to create a low pressure
zone inside the cabinet for avoiding leakage of hot air from the structure of
collector or that of the cabinet.The air leak points serve only as inlets for cold
air and not as outlets for hot air. In the design both thermosyphon mode and
forced convection mode were used for the movement of air by alternately oper-
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ating the fan for few minutes and then switching it off for 15-20 minutes so as to
keep sufficiently high temperature and low humidity in the drying chamber.

SELECTION OF DRYING CONTAINERS

The choice of material oftray and the thickness ofthe slurry layer in these trays
pose an interesting problem.This material should have the following qualities:
(1) the dried biomass should be easily detachable from it; (2) it should not react
chemically with the biomass; (3) it should not degrade at temperatures of 70-
80°C; (4) it should not emit fumes; (5) it should be cheap and light weight. We
tried trays made of several materials like stainless steel, aluminium, plastic,
glass, polyethelene, etc. We found that the biomass slurry sticks to the
material of the tray after drying and needs a mechanical device to detach it
from most of the trays except those of polyethelene. The process of collection
of dried biomass thus becomes cumbersome and also the trays get scratches.
The polyethelene trays also have the characteristics of low cost, light weight,
no chemical reaction with the biomass and stable at drying temperature.
These trays are commonly used for keeping and conserving eatables and are
also reusable.

RESULTAND DISCUSSION

The solar drier was monitored for several weeks in summer months at Florence
in Central Italy type climate for drying biomasses of two micro algae -
Spirulina and Scenedesmus. Figure 3 shows the drier temperature as a function
of time under unloaded conditions for a typical clear day in summer. The
drier temperature reaches 7 5 - 8 0 " ~on a clear day around 2 PM even though
the ambient temperature at this hour is around 35°C.
 1. PRAKASH et al.
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8 10 12 14 16. 18
Time of the day (hr)
FIGURE 3 Drier temperature under unloaded conditions as a function of time. -Drying
chamber temperature, - - - Ambient temperature, -. -incident solar radiation.

.
1 2 3 4 5

.
Time (hr)
FIGURE 4 Mo~sturccontent of Splrullne b~omasskept In three d~ffercntshelves as a Funct~on
ofdrymg tlme 0 bottom shelf, A mlddle shelf, 0 top shelf, Solar rad~at~on,
7 dr~cr tempera-
ture, ambient temperature.

Figure 4 shows the change in moisture content of Spirulina biomass kept

in three different shelves.(top,middle and bottom) of the drier as a function of
drying time. Figure 5 shows the same for Scen'edesmus biomass. The drying
process was started at about I1 AM with biomass having about 90% moisture.
 MICROALGAL BIOMASS DRYING
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1 2 3 4 5
Time (hr)
FIGURE 5 Moisture content of Scenedesmus biomass kept in three different shelves as a hmc-
tion of drying time. 0 bottom shelf, A middle shelf, top shelf, W Solar radiation, +drier tem-
perature, ambient temperature.

On a clear summer day the dried biomass with less than 10% moisture content
was collected in 3-5 hours depending on the placement of the biomass in the
drier.The drying chamber temperature was maintained around 60°C by regu-
lating the ventilation. (The solar drier is capable of reaching a maximum cham-
ber temperature of 80°C on a sunny day with low ventilation.) This produces a
sufficiently high drying temperature and causes a quick removal of humidity
from the chamber. The figures also show the solar radiation and the ambient
temperature for the period of drying. It can be noticed that the biomass dried
faster in the trays kept in the upper shelves.This can be attributed to a high con-
tribution of direct sun drying and a relatively high temperature in the upper
zone of the chamber. The pattern of drying process for both the algal biomass
is similar. Further one may notice that the dryingcurves are similar to the typi-
cal curves (Prakash et al., 1988; Garg et al., 1991) obtained for solar drying of
crops, timber, etc.
Another problem observed was that once the top layer of the slurry is dried
it forms a boundary almost impermeable for the water vapour from the
lower layers to escape. In this way even though the temperature of the slurry
was high enough for fast evaporation yet the moisture content of the biomass
did not decrease but instead it degraded. We tried trays with slurry layer thick-
nesses varying from 1mm to 6 mm. We observed that the biomass in the trays
carrying upto 3 mm thickslurry driedwell. In these trays the toplayer after dry-
ing cracked and slowly the thin sheet of dried biomass detached from the tray
 310 J . PRAKASH er al,

at the cracks, thereby facilitating the moisture from the lower layers to leave. In
this way the moisture content from the bottom layers could also decrease leav-
ing a thin sheet ofdried biomass that can be detached easily from the tray with-
out the need of scrubbing. In the trays containing more than 3 mm thick
biomass slurry the top layer after drying did not crack and the lower layers re-
tained moisture enough to degrade the biomass at high drier temperature.
Similar observations were also made by Venkataraman et al. (1980). We also
observed that Scenedesmus poses less problems in drying as compared to
Spirulina. However, Spirulina prewashed with deionized water'produced bet-
ter quality dried biomass. Spirulinaslurry dried producing biomass in the form
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of thin small flakes whereas Scenedesmus slurry on drying produced large

sized flakes.
The average output of the drier was about 250-300 g per day. This corre-
sponds to about 140glday-m2 of total collector area. This dry biomass
production rate is in the same range as reported by Lincoln etal. (1980);
McGarry etal. (1971) and Richmond et al. (1987). However, in our case the dry-
ing time was only about 3-5 hours and not the full day
We further observed that the dried biomass did not emit unpleasant odour
generally associated with sun drying process as the drying rate was accelerated
so as to achieve the dried product in 3-5 hours at a medium temperature of
60°C.

Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the technical assistance given by Messers Sacchi
Angelo and Eduardo Pinzani in the construction of the solar drier. J. Prakash
is indebted to Prof. G. Furlan, Head, ICTP Programme for Training and
Research in Italian Laboratories for providing the financial support and to
Prof. R. Materassi, Director, Centro Studio dei Microrganismi Autotrofi C.
N. R., for providing the working facilities. This research was partially sup-
ported by National Research Council of Italy through special project RAISA,
sub-project-4, paper no. 2618.

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