In the present study, concepts are pursued that are less energy
intensive. It has been pointed out in literature that the dewatering
of microalgae is one of the main bottlenecks in algal culturing. In
the model of Lardon (Lardon et al., 2009), the energy required for
the dewatering process accounted for 84.9% of the total energy
consumption. To improve the overall energy balance, the energy
consumption of the dewatering has to be reduced. This can be
achieved by two different strategies: one is to improve the dewatering
efficiency by using new low energy consuming drying techniques
(dry route), and the second one is to avoid the drying
process by applying oil extraction in the water phase (wet route).
Both the dry and wet route strategies are described in the next section. In Section 3, an overview of the energy balance for both
routes is presented. Finally, in Section 4, the results are presented
and the dry and wet route is compared.