Therefore, the requirement for microalgae recovery is to somehow remove a significant amount of water (Schlesinger et al., 2012), which definitely entails more power consumption when the microalgae are conditioned for processing.
Using thermal or mechanical recovery techniques, such as induced drying, filter-pressing or centrifuging would need significant power consumption and so impact the final product cost (Grima et al., 2003).
Efficiency of the flocculants for microalgal biomass sedimentation has been shown by many studies on various phototrophic microbe cultures (Wan et al., 2015). There is evidence that with the use of commercially produced flocculants, it would be possible to achieve 0.5 to 10–50 g/l of biomass concentration in the sediment (Wileman et al., 2011).