Tuesday, April 20, 2010
LL Conference Facility (Hilton Clearwater Beach)
Erik M. Kuhn1, Xiaowen Chen2, Joe Shekiro1, Nick Nagle3, Melvin Tucker4, Stephen R. Decker5 and Richard T. Elander1, (1)National Bioenergy Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, (2)National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, (3)National Bioenergy Center, NREL, Golden, CO, (4)NREL, Golden, CO, (5)Chemical and Biosciences Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO
The supply, political, and environmental concerns of petroleum based fuels has stimulated the need to produce liquid transportation fuels from renewable sources. One research focus is the cost-competitive biochemical conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels. Dilute-acid pretreatment hydrolyzes xylan into soluble monomers as well as soluble and insoluble oligomers. The goal of this work is to thermochemically convert xylo-oligomers into monomers while minimizing xylose degradation. Pretreated liquids and slurries produced in a high-solids, continuous, dilute-acid pretreatment reactor will be used in bench-scale xylo-oligomer conversion experiments. To determine the statistically significant factors in thermochemical xylo-oligomer conversion, a factorial experimental design will be carried out involving reaction temperature, time, and catalyst loading. Results from enzymatic hydrolysis experiments using xylanase to convert soluble and insoluble xylo-oligomers will also be presented.
