Liquid hot water pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass at lab and pilot scale

Liquid hot water pretreatment is considered to be a promising method for increaing biomass digestibility due to the moderate operational conditions without chemical additionA necessary step towards the scalability of this pretreatment process is performing pilot plant triaUpscaling was evaluated with a scaling factor of 500, by using 50 mL in...

Subcritical CO₂ shows no effect on liquid hot water pretreatment of poplar wood

Pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass is required for many biorefinery processes. Previous studies have described hydrolysis of hemicelluloses by using liquid hot water (LHW) pretreatment. We evaluated the effect of carbonic acid originating from pressurized carbon dioxide during LHW pretreatment of poplar. The conditions applied covered...

Integrated Vacuum Stripping and Adsorption for the Efficient Recovery of (Biobased) 2-Butanol

Biobased 2-butanol offers high potential as biofuel, but its toxicity toward microbial hosts calls for efficient techniques to alleviate product inhibition in fermentation processes. Aiming at the selective recovery of 2-butanol, the feasibility of a process combining in situ vacuum stripping followed by vapor adsorption has been assessed...

Recovery of acetate by anion exchange with consecutive CO₂-expanded methanol desorption: A model-based approach

Production of bio-based acetate is commonly hindered by the high costs of the downstream processing. In this paper, a model is developed to describe a new method that recovers acetate salts using anion exchange resins, and subsequently desorbs and upgrades them using CO₂-expanded alcohol. The model consists of equilibrium...

Perspectives for the microbial production of methyl propionate integrated with product recovery

A new approach was studied for bio-based production of methyl propionate, a precursor of methyl methacrylate. Recombinant E. coli cells were used to perform a cascade reaction in which 2-butanol is reduced to butanone using alcohol dehydrogenase, and butanone is oxidized to methyl propionate and ethyl acetate using a Baeyer-Villiger...

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...

Theoretical performance of countercurrent reactors for production of enantiopure compounds

Irreversible reactions are being applied in enzymatic kinetic resolution to obtain enantiomerically pure compounds from racemic mixtures. Using model calculations for situations without mass transfer limitation, we show that reversible reactions might also be useful for enzymatic kinetic resolution, provided that countercurrent systems are used...

Fumaric acid production by fermentation

Abstract The potential of fumaric acid as a raw material in the polymer industry and the increment of cost of petroleum-based fumaric acid raises interest in fermentation processes for production of this compound from renewable resources. Although the chemical process yields 112% w/w fumaric acid from maleic anhydride and the fermentation...

Technical and Economical Feasibility of Production of Ethanol from Sugar Cane and Sugar Cane Bagasse

The primary aim of this study is to investigate and analyze the sugar-ethanol plants operating in Brazil to construct a raw model to gain better understanding and insight about the technical and economical aspects of the currently operating plants. And, the secondary aim is to combine the knowledge gathered from the currently existing plant with...