Browsing by Author "Ferreira, Maria da Conceição"
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- Extracção verde de composto marinhos bioactivos para aplicação industrialPublication . Ferreira, Maria da Conceição; Matos, Cristina Maria Fernandes Delerue Alvim deA comparative life cycle assessment was performed to investigate four diferente scenarios for lipid extraction. The extraction technologies studied were ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) and microwave assisted extraction (MAE), supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) with CO2 as solvent and subcritical water extraction (SWE). Target lipids were ω3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as eicosapentaenoic (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA) acids. SFE was the most energy consuming process, while MAE and SWE were the methods with the lowest environmental impact. To produce 1 kg of lipids the UAE process would need more than a ton of microalgae, which means that this process in terms of efficiencym is the worst and consequently not indicated to extract lipid with the conditions used. The life cycle assessment presented here doesn’t include the cultivating and harvesting phases. Further optimizations including these steps would be required in order to reduce the environmental impact of the whole process. In this sense, the results obtained may indicate the direction to achieve this goal.