Impact of primary treatment methods on sludge characteristics and digestibility, and wastewater treatment plant-wide economics

Biogas production from anaerobic sludge digestion plays a central role for wastewater treatment plants to become more energy-efficient or even energy-neutral. Dedicated configurations have been developed to maximize the diversion of soluble and suspended organic matter to sludge streams for energy production through anaerobic digestion, such...

Analysis of biomass hydrothermal liquefaction and biocrude-oil upgrading for renewable jet fuel production: The impact of reaction conditions on production costs and GHG emissions performance

This paper shows a detailed analysis of a biomass HTL process by considering changes in three main reaction variables (i.e. catalysts (water, Na₂CO₃(aq.), and Fe(aq.)), temperature (280–340 °C), and catalysts/biomass mass ratio (0–0.33 kg catalysts/kg biomass)), and by assessing their influence on the techno-economic and...

Vapour permeation for ethanol recovery from fermentation off–gas

In ethanol fermentations, about 2% of the ethanol leaves the fermenter with the off–gas. Conventionally, this is recovered by absorption in water. As alternative, vapour permeation was investigated conceptually for ethanol recovery from fermentation off–gas. A preliminary techno–economic evaluation of this system using hydrophobic membrane...

In-situ product removal by membrane extraction

In bioproduction processes of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, downstream processing usually is a significant cost factor. The products require a high purity (especially biopharmaceutical products), therefore, the process usually contains a large number of separation steps. Moreover, the high costs in downstream processing are caused by the fact...