Industrial Biotechnology

Production of biodiesel by esterification or transesterification of long-chain fatty acids is a well known process, but the fuel product has characteristics making it not fully compatible with petroleum diesel engines. A better option is to convert fatty acid molecules to hydrocarbons by removing...

A major challenge in developing biorefinery is that the availability of biomass often limits the scale of the plant thus the feasibility of an operation. We proposed an integrated lipid-based platform as one technical option. According to this concept, different biomass resources will be first...

Much of the process complexity and high capital costs associate with cellulosic ethanol (dilute acid hydrolysis as a pretreatment and enzymatic saccharification of cellulose) results from side products such as furfural, acetate, and soluble lignin compounds that inhibit the biocatalysts. Inhibitor...

The conversion of C5-C6 sugars into 2-furfural (FA) and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) have been considered as key intermediate step in the production of transportation fuels and chemicals from ligno-cellulosic biomass. Typically, the process involves the dehydration reaction of the sugars catalyze...

Some processes aimed to biofuels production, use lignocellulosic wastes as feedstocks for fermentative conversion. If this is the case, pretreatment is required to make these resources fully digestible. Among a wide range of pretreatment options, this study focuses and compares oxidative-alkaline...

Presented is a novel gasification application where biomass is steam-gasified and natural gas is steam-reformed simultaneously in a solar reactor. Solar-driven gasification is a proven technology, and can augment the biofuel industry as a domestic fuel source. Gasification performed in an...

Depleting oil reserves have encouraged the development of technologies to harness the natural resources to sustain the energy needs. Renewable lignocellulosic biomasses have been focus of many studies but advances in the purification and recovering of the products from the product medium has been...

Hydrolysates from dilute acid pretreatment of biomass contain various biomass degradation products which are inhibitory to enzymes and toxic to microorganisms. One of the main inhibitory compounds is acetic acid which is released from the lignin-hemicellulose matrix in the biomass. Acetic acid at...

Over one fifth of calories consumed by humanity are from rice. Consequently, vast quantities of rice hulls are disposed of as waste, since the hull constitutes 20% of rice mass. Standard practice for disposal of rice hulls is burning, generating pollution and CO 2 , or thrown away in vast...

Poly(oxymethylene) Dimethyl Ethers as components of tailored diesel fuel - properties, synthesis and purification concepts Jakob Burger 1* , Markus Siegert 2 , Eckhard Ströfer 2 , Michael Nilles 2 , Hans Hasse 1 1 Laboratory of Engineering Thermodynamics, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany; 2...