DOI: https://doi.org/10.55373/mjchem.v28i3.38

Keywords: Spirulina, bio-oil, thermal degradation, hydrothermal, glucose

Abstract

Non-food type of feedstock to formed bio-oil through thermal reaction has attracted significant research attention. Spirulina Platensis can be converted into bio-oil via thermal process (pyrolysis, hydrothermal, hydrogenation) where the main challenges faces are to determine the potential product that will be upgraded to form biofuel. Microalgae become attractive feed for production of biofuel that give advantages in scale up for industrial purposed. The objective of this study is to determine the characteristic of bio-oil obtained by subcritical hydrothermal liquefaction including proximate, ultimate analysis, thermal degradation behaviour as well as analysis of liquid products by FTIR and GC-MS instrument. Raw Spirulina contain 45.32 % carbon and 8.08% hydrogen element with 93.10% of total solid and 83.62% of volatile matter considered potential to convert become bio-oil. Thermal gravimetric analysis exposed that the major mass change occurs at temperature between 200 °C to 350 °C. Hence subcritical hydrothermal liquefaction was conducted at temperature 350 °C in presence of air at the retention time 15 min by using 100 mL stainless steel reactor. Result of bio-oil shows that subcritical hydrothermal liquefaction able to hydrolyzes the glucose become small unit of sugar due to detection of functional group carboxylic acid, alkane and alcohols.