Monday, April 30, 2012
Napoleon Ballroom C-D, 3rd fl (Sheraton New Orleans)
Within the past decade many pretreatment methods have been applied for treatment of lignocellulosic biomass prior to an enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation. DTU has been involved in developing biomass pretreatment technology for some years. In this hydrothermal pretreatment it is possible to handle biomass at high dry matter contents (30-40 %) based solely on steam application at elevated temperatures (160-215°C) producing low amount of inhibitors. It can be performed without addition of chemicals and oxygen which is an advantage when designing pretreatment solutions for large quantities of biomass. A commercial facility currently exists at the Inbicon facility at Kalundborg, Denmark with a capacity to pretreat 4000 kg/h of lignocellulosic substrate. This existing process has now been downscaled to pilot batch scale (5 kg/batch) and placed at DTU to benchmark the pretreatment method for different substrates.
In the frame of a collaborative project between Europe and Brazil the aim is to establish joint research on hydrothermal pretreatment on wheat straw and sugarcane bagasse/straw. The project aims pilot scale hydrothermal pretreatment optimization experiments on wheat straw, as one of the most abundant lignocellulosic substrate in Europe and on sugarcane bagasse/straw from Brazil. It will improve, from bench to industrial scale, the efficiency of high solids load of biomass hydrothermal treatments by establishing the correlation between the bench pre-treatment reactors and big pilot plants with capacities of 100 kg and 1000 kg straw/bagasse per hour.