Bioenergy

A carbon dioxide – water pretreatment process was developed for guayule biomass. The guayule biomass was mixed with water and then loaded to a reactor where it was exposed to a biphasic environment consisting of CO2 rich vapor phase and water rich liquid phase. Then, the biomass was enzymatically...

The first step in the conversion process of biomass to biofuels or hydrogen lies in picking an environmentally friendly solvent which is capable of breaking up the crystalline microstructure of cellulose. Once the cellulose is in suspension, enzymes (cellulases) are added to the reactor to...

Concerns about dwindling fossil fuel reserves and climate change, energy independence, and depletion of ecosystem goods and services have driven the development of alternative technologies such as biomass-based fuels (biofuels). Although biofuels may be a step towards alleviating the aforementioned...

Biodiesel is a renewable, carbon-neutral fuel that can ease pressure on the world’s dwindling supply of oil and petroleum diesel. This research explores production of biodiesel from alternative low-value feedstocks such as waste oils. Traditional biodiesel reactions mix an alcohol and a refined...

Bio-Ethanol/water separation by fractional distillation becomes a popular industrial process to remove water from ethanol-water mixture. However, the mixture of 95.6wt% ethanol and 4.4 wt% water is an azeotrope and cannot be further purified by distillation. Alternatively, this can be achieved by...

Preparation of Mesoporous Silica-supported Palladium Catalyst for Biofuel Upgrade Ling Fei, Joshua Hill, Qianglu Lin, Yun Xu, Shuguang Deng, Hongmei Luo Department of Chemical Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003 A large number of reactions in organic chemistry (such as...

Corresponding author: Shulin Chen. Tel: 509-335-3743; Fax: 509-335-2722 E-mail: chens@wsu.edu An increasing attention has been paid to anaerobic digestion (AD) for converting the organic fraction of municipal solid wastes (OFMSW) to renewable energy and reducing environmental impact. Since OFMSW is...

The benefits of delignification on plant cell wall digestibility by hydrolytic enzymes are well described in the literature. The presence of lignin increases non-productive binding of cellulases, resulting in enzyme inhibition and decrease in the sugar yields. Moreover, lignin acts as an anti-...

Algae have recently received much attention due to their potential as a source of clean biofuel. One of the key economic hurdles in the production of biofuel from algal feedstocks continues to be the harvesting process. Flocculation shows great potential for lowering the economic hurdle by...

The development of fuels from alternative and renewable sources to replace commercial petroleum products has been a subject of increasing research in recent years. At present, there are few economically feasible processes to produce jet fuel from plant oils and animal fats, especially with non-...