Rapid “on the field” analysis of sorghum biomass composition

As a developer of renewable biomass crops for the biobased economy, NexSteppe is actively engaged in crop breeding and agronomy R&D to develop sorghum feedstocks. NexSteppe sweet sorghum hybrids produce juice with readily accessible sucrose and glucose geared as fermentation feedstocks.  Nexsteppe low moisture, high biomass sorghums are targeted towards second generation cellulosic biofuel, biochemical and bio-power customers. 

A common bottleneck in feedstock R&D and biomass supply chain quality control is speed of chemical composition analysis. Bio-based industries face a unique challenge due to raw material variability, dependent on genetics, soil, agronomic practices, weather conditions, location, and harvest date. Understanding of this variability using wet chemistry methods for biomass characterization, requires a dedicated workforce, is slow, expensive, and not suitable for screening large numbers of samples.

On field rapid biomass characterization can help manage crop conditions and also help determine a purchase price based on constituent value and blend feedstocks by end use. ¹ In addition, NexSteppe which has the largest U.S. breeding program dedicated to energy sorghums (~8,000 plots across 40 acres in 2014, each with a unique line, hybrid or population) has also developed field analysis for faster selection of hybrids with desirable traits for further propagation. This presentation will describe the development of new spectroscopic methods, calibration, validation and ongoing analysis for field based NIR technologies like our forage harvester mounted NIR technology and hand held NIR technology.

References

1. Methods for Biomass Compositional Analysis,  Sluiter, et al, Catalysis for the Conversion of Biomass and Its Derivatives, Proceedings2