Industrial Biotechnology

Furfural is an important chemical and also a building block for production of drop-in hydrocarbon fuels and can be produced from cellulosic biomass such as woody crops and bagasse by hydrolysis and dehydration with mineral acids. However, furfural yields employing current technologies are limited...

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...

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...

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...

One of the limitations of screening enzyme combinations using microplate based assays (Gao et al. 2010, Bioresour Technol 101, 8:2770) is that these are typically carried out using milled biomass (1 mm). The crude glycosyl hydrolase mixtures were also analyzed using a high-throughput proteomics...

The goal of present study is to characterize the effect of pressure and heating rate on the devolatilization behavior of different biomass species. Three biomass species (southern Pine, corn stover, and switchgrass) were studied. A combination of two complementary gasification devices are utilized...

Saccharification of fermentable sugars is one of the most critical steps in producing bio-ethanol from lignocellulosics through Consolidate Bioprocessing (CBP). However, the extreme pH and ethanol concentration are commonly considered to be the potential inhibitory factors for the application of...

The biological pretreatment of wood biomass for degrading lignin, a complex aromatic polymer, has received much attention as an environmentally safe or “green” process. Generally, enzymes isolated from naturally occurring fungi, or with enzymes produced by genetically engineered fungi have been...

The Rule of thumb for reactor design and process conditions for supercritical water gasification of wet biomass is introduced. The important aspects includes heat transfer and heating rate, reaction rate, plugging, gas composition, inorganic element behavior, and heat of reaction. The know-hows...

The rule of thumb for reactor design and process condition for biodiesel production is introduced. The important aspect includes type of feedstock oil, catalyst selection, methanol/oil ratio, quality of the produced biodiesel. When low quality plant oil is used as the feedstock, its pre-treatment...