Winemakers have long known that blending different grape varietals can favorably balance the flavor characteristics of the wine they produce. In the future, makers of advanced biofuels might use a similar strategy, blending different feedstock varieties to balance the energy characteristics of the transportation fuel they produce.
A collaborative study by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center led by Berkeley Lab, and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has shown that an ionic liquid proven to be effective for pre-treating individual biofuel feedstocks is also effective at pre-treating multiple different feedstocks that have been mixed and densified into a blend.
"Our results show that an ionic liquid pre-treatment can efficiently handle mixed feedstocks that have been milled and densified into pellets, and can generate high yields of fermentable sugars regardless of upstream processing," says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI's Deconstruction Division. "This indicates that blending and densifying a wide range of feedstocks has significant potential for helping to make biofuels a cost-competitive transportation fuel technology."
Simmons and his JBEI colleague Seema Singh, director of JBEI's Biomass Pretreatment group, led the JBEI/INL study in which four biomass feedstocks, representing the general classes of plants well-suited to serving as fuel crops, were mixed and milled into either flour or pellets then pre-treated with 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate ([C2mim][OAc]), the ionic liquid used at JBEI as a benchmark for biomass processing. The objective was to determine the impact of mixing and densification on the efficiency at which the complex polysaccharides in cellulosic biomass could be converted into fermentable sugars for fuel production.
"Lignocellulosic biorefineries must be able to efficiently process available regiona
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| Contact: Lynn Yarris lcyarris@lbl.gov 510-486-5375 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |
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