RESUMO
Drying the biomass produced is one of the critical steps to avoid cell degradation; however, its high energy cost is a significant technological barrier to improving this type of bioprocess's technical and economic feasibility. This work explores the impact of the biomass drying method of a strain of Potamosiphon sp. on the extraction efficiency of a phycoerythrin-rich protein extract. To achieve the above, the effect of time (12-24 h), temperature (40-70 °C), and drying method (convection oven and dehydrator) were determined using an I-best design with a response surface. According to the statistical results, the factors that most influence the extraction and purity of phycoerythrin are temperature and moisture removal by dehydration. The latter demonstrates that gentle drying of the biomass allows removing the most significant amount of moisture from the biomass without affecting the concentration or quality of temperature-sensitive proteins.
RESUMO
The high freshwater consumption requirements in shrimp biorefinery approaches represents one of the major drawbacks of implementing these technologies within the shrimp processing industry. This also affects the costs associated with the plant operation, and consequently, the overall economic performance of the project. The application of mass integration tools such as water pinch analysis can reduce frewshwater consumption by up to 80%, contributing to shrimp biorefinery sustainability. In this work, the economic evaluation and the techno-economic sensitivity analysis for a mass integrated approach for shrimp biorefinery were performed to determine the economic feasibility of the project when located in the North-Colombia region and to identify the critical techno-economic variables affecting the profitability of the process. The integrated approach designed to process 4113.09 tons of fresh shrimp in Colombia reaches a return on investment (%ROI) at 65.88% and a net present value (NPV) at 10.40 MM USD. The process supports decreases of up to 28% in capacity of production and increases of 12% and 11% in the cost of raw materials and variable operating costs without incurring losses, respectively. These findings suggest that the proposed design of the water recycling network coupled to a shrimp biorefinery approach is attractive from an economic point of view.