Microalgae Biorefineries: Experimental, Synthesis and Optimization

The change of the focus of Chemical Engineering, from traditional transformation processes, to sustainable utilization of resources, has promoted a revolution in the way of designing novel chemical processes, being in general terms, more dedicated to find the industrial application than to the phenomenological science. If the goal of reach sustainability is clear, the technical issues for transforming the ideas into viable actions is still under construction, and involve a wide number of aspects that includes, but is not limited, to the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge, the development of novel technologies, and the efficient use of renewable feedstocks. This book presents the development of a topology of microalgae-based biorefinery, considered as a scheme or flowsheet, with the sequence necessary for the total use of microalgae biomass and its transformation into a set of products. This development was supported on three pillars: the experimentation, Computer Aided Process Engineering and process synthesis.