Research Projects

The study aims to address the challenges of disposing of reject water obtained after Reverse Osmosis (RO) for drinking water production. Microalgal desalination is a cost-effective and novel approach to address this issue, but its performance is affected by external environmental factors such as light intensity, photoperiod, pH, temperature, and aeration rate. The scientific objectives include conducting desalination studies using five microalgae species in lab scale photobioreactors, optimizing operating conditions to maximize desalination rate, biomass growth rate, and lipid content, conducting pyrolysis of harvested biomass to characterize products like bio-oil, biochar, and noncondensable gases, activating biochar post-activation with various agents, and evaluating the efficiency of biochar in metal ion removal. The hypothesis is that statistical optimization of parameters affecting desalination of RO reject water by microalgae in photobioreactors can lead to a significant increase in microalgae performance. The biomass produced after desalination will be rich in lipid content due to salt stress, and the char produced through pyrolysis can have abundant functional groups that serve as binding sites during metal ion removal. Main experiments include desalination studies in lab scale photobioreactors, optimization of parameters affecting desalination, production of biochar and bio-oil from biomass, and characterization of biochar for heavy metal ion removal. The study's significance is expected to be significant, as the results obtained can serve as initial data for the design of large-scale photobioreactors and aid in economic and efficient industrial photobioreactor design.