A research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have published a report determining the theoretical limits of reactions that are critical to the extraction of glucose from cellulose and hemicellulose.
“Cellulose and hemicellulose are recalcitrant,” NIST chemist Robert Goldberg told Science Daily. “They don’t want to break down. It takes a long time for wood to rot. It even takes termites a long time to break wood down, and they’re pretty good at it. Ethanol producers face the same problem. Because of the way these molecules are arranged, it’s difficult to get access to the reactive centers in wood and other biomass. What we have done is to study some of the most basic reactions associated with the breakdown of these materials.”
The team said that process engineering and bioengineers can use the resulting “thermodynamic property values” to maximize the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol production.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have completed the first analysis of processing necessary to convert pig manure into a transport or heating fuel. The study used a pig...
In Missouri, ICM has debuted a new process to extract more food for human consumption from the ethanol conversion process that uses field corn used for livestock. The process, called Total Kernel Opti...
The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the National Biodiesel Board are reporting that their 12 month study of St. Louis Metro buses using B20 showed that fuel economy dropped 1.76 from the...
Cereal Process Technologies completed performance tests of the nation’s largest fractionation plant at Renew Energy’s 130-million-gallon ethanol plant at Jefferson, Wisconsin. Renew Energy’s f...
In Ohio, Arisdyne Systems, a fuel cavitation technology, announced that it has raised $5.3 million in equity financing to expand its research into biofuel production. Arisdyne will license technology ...
In Illinois, researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign surveyed local farmers and report that the major challenge in developing cellulosic ethanol will be to persuade farmers to grow t...
