Intervention of microfluidics in biofuel and bioenergy sectors: Technological considerations and future prospects

Highlights: • Microalgal biodiesel and MFC's are the two well-studied disciplines of this decade. • Microfluidic technology utilizes lesser samples and facilitates higher surface area. • Microfluidics facilitates better cultivation and process conditions for algal biodiesel production. • Taking heuristics of microfluidics the MFC's can easily turn into integrated systems. -- Abstract: Biofuels/Bioenergy is renewable in nature by mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions despite rapid economic growth and energy demand. Biodiesel and bioethanol production from renewable sources are gaining much attention but unable to translate the technologies into commercially ventures. Several technical challenges like the screening of algae/yeast for higher lipid accumulation/ethanol production, separation and purification of microalgae from contaminants, harvesting of microalgae, improving transesterification efficiency with meager solvent consumption, energy and time have been addressed using microfluidic devices. Besides, it has shown promising results in microbial fuel cell domain. Microfluidics and microreactors offer miniaturization of experiments by a very little expense of solvents, energy and time with higher precision results. Moreover, it provides 19.2% higher surface to volume ratio when compared with Petri dish (35 mm diameter) and microchannel (50 µm tall, 50 µm wide, and 30 mm long). Higher surface to volume ratio is helpful in the integration of the whole laboratory (i.e., lab-on-a-chip), where efficient screening of ethanol/lipid producer, higher transesterification efficiency could be ascertained. Due to the overwhelming potential of microfluidics in biofuel and bioenergy sectors, the present review article illustrated several examples to depict the importance of microfluidics towards high-throughput analysis of screening the potent microbial/microalgal strain, fabrication of microfluidic bioreactor, quality analysis of biofuel and bioenergy products.