(546f) Process Modeling and Economic Evaluation of the Ozone and Soaking Aqueous Ammonia Pretreatment Process with Aspen Plus

The ozone and soaking aqueous ammonia pretreatment (OSAA) is a novel process that operates at low temperatures and ambient pressure to effectively remove lignin from wheat straw and other herbaceous biomasses. Prior work has demonstrated that the OSAA pretreatment process is able to remove up to 80% of lignin from the biomass, resulting in greater than 90% sugar yield after enzymatic hydrolysis for 72 hours using 15 FPU and 15 CBU cellulase and β-glucosidase loading, respectively. In this work, a comprehensive process model has been developed for the sequential pretreatment of wheat straw with the OSAA process. The pretreatment process has been simulated using collected data for ozone pretreatment and soaking aqueous ammonia pretreatment. In addition, a techno-economic assessment was performed to calculate the operating costs and to estimate the capital cost. The results indicate that operating at low temperatures and pressures, while requiring moderately longer residence time than higher severity pretreatments, is able to effectively pretreat lignocellulose at lower production costs.