Evodos will award four algae harvesting centrifugals at the ABO summit

Oct. 17, 2011 - PRLog -- BREDA, The Netherlands — As a sign of gratitude to their support, Evodos will award a state-of-the-art algae harvester to four scientists, Mark Edwards, Mario Tredici, Kirsten Heimann and Rene Wijffels.

Marco Brocken, Chief Executive Officer of Evodos B.V., says “The assistance and feedback of these scientists were vital for us to understand the business requirements in the algae industry. It requires courage and persistence to enter a new market. They helped us to overcome the initial hurdles. We now see the acceptance of our harvesting centrifugals and the business success our customers are having with it. We thought it was time to honor them publicly by awarding each of them with our new Evodos type 10 centrifugal.”

Mark Edwards, professor at the Arizona State University, made us aware of the excellent performance of Evodos to harvest small Algae with high efficiency. Mark has been very supportive in bringing Evodos technology to the attention of key people in the algae industry

Mark Edwards: "I've seen a wide range of harvesting tools and your new centrifugal technology seems excellent due to its ability to harvest small Algae with high efficiency."

Mario Tredici, professor at the University of Florence, Italy and President of the European Algae Biomass Association gave us insight in the metrics used in the algae industry. Especially the low energy requirement per kilogram algae harvested attracted his interest. He invited us to participate in the EU funded Biofat project and gives us a podium on many occasions.

Mario Tredici:  “Very interesting. It seems that you are able to harvest and concentrate Nannochloropsis into a paste with dry solid content of over 30% with an energy expenditure of 0.95kWh/m3. If this is the case it is a great achievement. Congratulations !”

Kirsten Heimann, Associate Professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, is responsible for all tests of MBD Energy carried out with Evodos centrifuges. She is the first scientist who scientifically documented the performance of Evodos algae harvesting.
Kirsten Heimann: “The biomass coming out of the Evodos is essentially alive. That means you increase the shelf life of your product to several days, if not up to a week.”

Rene Wijffels, professor at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands gave us access to his researchers at an early stage. This gave us insight in the energy and scalability requirements the industry is facing. We are proud that he will include the Evodos algae harvester in a project where a comparison and combinations of alternative harvesting technologies will be made.

Rene Wijffels: “For production of microalgae for commodities a scalable low energy harvesting technology is of key importance.”

Marco Brocken and Hen Boele, founders of Evodos, will hand over the awards at the next ABO Summit during their presentation slot on Thursday, October 27.