Fermentation and Enzymatic Digestion
With the increased focus on the use of more environmentally friendly techniques in industries globally in order to minimize pollution and energy consumption, biotechnological methods are receiving greater attention. The use of biological methods to recover oil from POME is considered to be friendly to the environment. Generally, the unit operations involved in the enzymatic oil recovery from POME consists of mixing/agitation, solid-liquid separation, centrifugation, oil purification, and the application of suitable temperature and pH. Chow et al. (1987) in their earlier work had shown that treatment of sludge with enzyme is able to degrade the remaining intact or partially macerated oil cell, hence freeing the entrapped oil. The freed oil is then dislodge from the matrix of the cell material by the use of surface active agent such as sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) (Ho et al. 1992).