The use of green technologies will improve the economic performance of the overall process through reduced waste and wastewater treatment costs and reduced costs for removal of impurities from the isolated sugar streams diverted into fermentation.
Innovation
ULTRASOUND can increase the surface area of the treated biomass and provide sufficient delignification to facilitate the hydrolysis of the carbohydrate components in the subsequent process steps.
Hemicellulose hydrolysis and further matrix degradation can be provided by the action of subcritical and/or supercritical CO2 (SC-CO2).
Enzymatic hydrolysis needs will be tailored to the pre-treatment methods used
Each constituent in the biomass (plant) can and will be functionalized in order to produce non-food and food fractions
The ambition of US4GREENCHEM is to combine only green technologies for the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into a sustainable biorefinery for chemicals and fuels. The full integration and optimization of multi-frequency ultrasound treatment with supercritical CO2 and enzymatic hydrolysis has not been attempted before.
