Biofuels (Energy)

In the current ecological climate there is a strong push to find a renewable energy resource to reduce the usage of fossil fuels which are depleting and are causing greenhouse gas emissions. Biorenewable materials, particularly lignocellulosic biomass, have received increased attention recently as...

Plant lignin is a source of useful chemicals, and also the major barrier for saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass for ethanol conversion. The enzymatic lignin degradation/modification could bypass the need for chemical pretreatment and thereby facilitate bioprocess consolidation. Herein, we...

There are two major problems in current cellulosic ethanol production process: low ethanol productivity and high enzyme loading. Based on the current Separate Hydrolysis and Fermentation (SHF) process, it takes at least 96h to perform enzymatic hydrolysis to convert AFEX-CS to fermentable sugars at...

A key hurdle in realizing commercial-scale production of biodiesel from cultured algae is efficient harvesting/dewatering of algal cells. In order to produce a gallon of biodiesel from algae, thousands of gallons of water must be processed, even when algal biomass is grown in relatively...

The use of biomass as a source of energy has been studied extensively inrecent years, and special attention has been paid to biomass gasification. In this study, ASPEN Plus is used to conduct technoeconomic analysis of a large biomass gasification system. A biorefinery scenario consisting of 2,000...

Accidental fires in wood pellets silos happen frequently in the last five years. Experiments were carried out in this work at temperature range of 100 o C to 200 o C to study wood pellets chemical oxidation process. A self-heating model was developed to simulate the self-heating process using the...

The pyrolytic conversion of biomass to into liquid fuels has the potential to become drop-in transportation fuels if some of its negative attributes such as high total acid number (TAN), high viscosity, and poor storage stability are overcome. We investigated nickel phosphide supported on fluid...

Separate processing of hemicellulose and cellulose to optimize ethanol production from corn stover Alexandre Chapeaux, Nancy Dowe, Daniel J. Schell Using a series of thermochemical (pretreatment) and biochemical steps, lignocellulosic biomass is converted to sugars that subsequently can be made...

A two-stage pyrolysis was conducted in this work. The purpose of the multiple stages is to provide a segregated product evolution in which the vapor products maybe be more selectively treated by catalysts to improve product quality and catalyst stability in comparison to one step pyrolysis in which...

When produced from waste lignocellulosic materials, hydrogen is one of the most promising options for a long-term, net-zero emission energy carrier. A major barrier to industrial scale production of bio-H 2 is its techno-economic feasibility. Advances in consolidated bioprocessing are required to...