Browsing by Author "Al-Hammadi, Mohammed"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Citation - WoS: 35
Citation - Scopus: 42
New Insights Into Chlorella Vulgaris Applications
(Wıley, 2024) Al-Hammadi, Mohammed; Güngörmüşler, Mine
Environmental pollution is a big challenge that has been faced by humans in contemporary life. In this context, fossil fuel, cement production, and plastic waste pose a direct threat to the environment and biodiversity. One of the prominent solutions is the use of renewable sources, and different organisms to valorize wastes into green energy and bioplastics such as polylactic acid. Chlorella vulgaris, a microalgae, is a promising candidate to resolve these issues due to its ease of cultivation, fast growth, carbon dioxide uptake, and oxygen production during its growth on wastewater along with biofuels, and other productions. Thus, in this article, we focused on the potential of Chlorella vulgaris to be used in wastewater treatment, biohydrogen, biocement, biopolymer, food additives, and preservation, biodiesel which is seen to be the most promising for industrial scale, and related biorefineries with the most recent applications with a brief review of Chlorella and polylactic acid market size to realize the technical/nontechnical reasons behind the cost and obstacles that hinder the industrial production for the mentioned applications. We believe that our findings are important for those who are interested in scientific/financial research about microalgae.
Polylactic Acid/Microalgal Biopolymer Synthesis: a Complete Process Including the Optimization of Microalgae and Biopolymer Characterization
(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2025) Al-Hammadi, Mohammed; Gungormusler, Mine
This study aims to investigate and enhance PLA/microalgal biopolymer properties and minimize microalgal production costs using a statistical design of experiments optimization methodology. The Box-Behnken design, which is a response surface-based methodology, was used for media optimization, resulting in a lower cost of microalgal cultivation and a lower yield compared with BG-11 with an average biomass weight and cell count of 226 mg l-1 and 1.704 cells ml-1 compared with 451 mg l-1 and 4 x 106 cells ml-1 obtained with BG-11, costing only US$ 0.017 l-1 for the utilized media. Furthermore, this cheap media composition demonstrated high substrate uptake up to 1200 mg l-1 for the first time for Chlorella vulgaris. Following the successful growth of microalgae, the biomass was harvested by centrifugation use of synthesized magnetic particles with a harvesting efficiency of 92.9% for further biopolymer production in which the polylactic acid was used in the solvent-casting method. This methodology was applied for the first time with a two-step annealing process at 105 degrees C with a comparative approach including a no-annealing process. The process results demonstrated improved tensile strength with a maximum value of 15.646 MPa, and to our knowledge, this is the highest obtained by utilizing Chlorella vulgaris with PLA in the solvent casting method. Finally, the biodegradation profiles in seawater were briefly examined, showing a weight reduction of up to 0.9-3.5 mg after 20 days.