There is a lot of money and research at the front end and backend areas of algae development. Steven Wright wants to be somewhere in the middle. Wright, the vice president for North-Carolina based InnovaTech, a filtration and separation technology provider, might just have the technology to put his company where he wants it to be. For the past 18 years, the team from InnovaTech has been developing separation equipment centered on centrifuge technology. Now, the team has tweaked its model to provide an efficient solution for algal separation and dewatering. “We are combining principles of centrification with froth flotation,” Wright says of his CFT unit.

The unit, which has already been tested at a North Carolina State University facility on 50 gallon photobioreactors, certainly shows that Wright and his team know what they are doing, but for the debate on where to be in the algae development process—cultivation, harvesting, separation, conversion, just to name a few—InnovaTech’s work might reveal a new milestone for an industry battling constant outside questioning on where it will end up, and internal debate among industry leaders on where it should even start.

Wright’s new algae harvester, which he describes as a stack of 45 RPM records inside a vessel that is capped on one end and open on the other, which looks similar to a centrifuge, indicates that in the internal debate perhaps  no one is right. It would be hard to argue that strain manipulation work being done at some of the most advanced laboratories is a waste, or that algae farm developments in New Mexico are a wash, especially if one considers what Wright’s harvester could do for the industry.

The process uses a precondition made up of a small amount of chemical and gas, Wright says. The spinning disc pack inside the unit sucks down the atmospheric pressure creating microbubbles. The microbubbles attach themselves to the larger algae pieces and through froth created from the spinning, the bubbles exit the unit. Because it can control the particle size that exits, Wright says the unit can allow for a continuous harvest of algae because the immature microorganisms would not be attached to bubbles and would not be removed but, instead, are returned to the bioreactors for further growth. More importantly, Wright’s work shows that there might just be a place for everyone in the algae industry.  

—Luke Geiver