Diatom-Based Material Production Demonstration
Abstract
Diatom cell walls have many potential applications. So far large-scale tests on applications have been conducted using diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth consists of fossilized diatom cell walls, which have non uniform size with a lot of debris and a large variability from batch to batch; these attributes prevent development of a standardized process. To our knowledge this effort was the first attempt to produce kilogram quantities of cell walls of a single species of diatom. Our goal was to produce 1.08kg of clean diatom cell walls for 6 species of diatoms that have different size and shape. We produced 8.5 kg of clean diatom cell walls from 7 different species of diatoms. This effort provides proof-of-principle that diatom cell walls can be produced at large scale. The key areas for additional development are further improvements in the process used to clean the cell walls, and cultivation of more species to expand the size and shape of available diatomcell walls.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 14, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1017972
Entities
People
- Agnieszka Pinowska
- David Hazlebeck
- Rodney Corpuz