(415f) Process Modeling of Integrated Forest Biorefinery – An Integrated Approach

Recently an increasing interest has been shown in lignocellulosic biorefineries because of the limited existence of petroleum in the world, the increase in the price of petroleum, the greenhouse gas effect caused by the use of fossil fuels, and the requirement of independence on foreign oil. In the near future, integrated forest biorefineries (IFBR) based on pulping mills could become the most important lignocellulosic biorefineries because dedicated energy trees such as hybrid poplar have not been available in large quantity and most of the available wood resources have already been used in the pulping mills and the facilities in the existing pulping mills, if developed into integrated forest biorefineries, could lead to reduction in the capital investment cost. Therefore, in order to analyze the process techno-economic performance and environmental effect, it is necessary to perform process modeling of a whole IFBR. In this paper, a whole IFBR based on pulping mill is described. An integrated approach for process modeling of the whole IFBR with combined use of Aspen Plus®, WinGEMS® and Microsoft Excel® is proposed. The mechanism of communication between Aspen Plus and WinGEMS is also depicted. Simulation of a simplified IFBR shows that the presented approach can be efficiently and reliably used for modeling of the whole IFBR process. In addition, the simulation results of case study are reasonable.