Monday, May 2, 2011
Grand Ballroom C-D, 2nd fl (Sheraton Seattle)
The Accelerated Solvent Extractor is an automated system developed to facilitate sample preparation prior to instrumental analysis and has primarily been used for environmental, food, and biological extraction procedures. It was designed to replace soxhlet or sonication methods. The ASE uses liquid solvents at elevated temperature (up to 200°C) and pressure (ca. 1500psi) to increase extraction efficiency. The model 350 has an autosampler and a corrosion resistant flow-path for use with acid or base making it suitable to use as a reactor for biomass pretreatment. A significant advantage of the ASE is that it can operate unattended once the methods and sequence parameters have been set. The flexibility of the ASE enables tunable (i.e., adjustable) pretreatment. We describe operating conditions where a reproducible amount of the xylan in corn stover was hydrolyzed during dilute-acid pretreatment with minimal furfural production. A reproducible bench-scale pretreatment system will facilitate research across a number of areas. The ASE could be used to qualify different batches of feedstock prior to processing at a larger scale perhaps enabling the ability to adjust a process according to the relative reactivity of the substrate. There is also an emerging need for fast screening of phenotypes from plant breeders or in cases where only a small amount of biomass available for testing. Since the ASE is a commercial system it enables data sharing between laboratories by having the same equipment in each lab.