A novel approach for enhancing lipid recovery for biodiesel production from wet energy biomass using surfactants-assisted extraction

Black soldier fly larvae with high contents of lipids can be used as a novel biomass feed-stock. An efficient approach involving surfactants assisted extraction of lipid from the wet biomass in this study. Surfactants with functional molecular structure were found to be helpful to extract lipids in the extraction process. Control experiments were performed to investigate the influence of different factors (surfactant types, surfactant concentration, salt concentration, and extraction temperature) on the lipid extraction process from the wet energy biomass. These results suggested that the extraction capacity of lipid was 78.99% at the defined condition (solvent:water = 50 mL:30 mL, biomass:solvent = 30 g:50 mL, surfactant concentration = 0.5%, extraction time = 60 s, extraction temperature = 60 °C). In addition, the purities of saponifiable lipids for these surfactants used were more than 80% in the present work. Surfactant treatment had a weak effect on lipids compositions. The kinetic model of the surfactants assisted lipid extraction process was proposed. During solvent extraction, the extraction process is divided to the two main processes: washing process and diffusion process. The rate constants were 4.17 × 10−2 to 5.94 × 10−2 in the first stage and 1.43 × 10−3 to 2.78 × 10−3 in the second stage for surfactants treatment, respectively. The second stage constitutes the limitation step in the extraction process. Further, the results of thermodynamic parameters were determined from thermodynamic study of lipid extraction process. This research showed the surfactant assisted route is a high efficiency technique.