US4Greenchem

Main objectives

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.

The integration of ultrasound and supercritical CO2 with enzymatic hydrolysis into one process has the advantage of improving mass transfer (through the special characteristics of the pre-treatment methods) during hydrolysis, allowing for enhanced enzyme performance under high-solid loading and therefore more compact equipment and reduced overall infrastructure cost.

Green processes allow to separate the biomass in high quality streams increasing the versatility of the valorisation strategies possible. This generates a more competitive process that can be adapted to diverse geographical and economical landscapes.

Enzymes for cellulosic biomass degradation still represent a significant cost factor in biorefineries due to several shortcomings of currently available biocatalysts and their production systems. In order to improve this step the project will pursue a multi-target approach to improve the chances of an overall performance boost: screening for new enzyme and enzyme-producing organisms; improving existing and promising newly discovered enzymes to increase activity and stability; development of recycling strategies to allow the reuse of enzymes and reduce the overall enzyme-consumption; formulation of improved cocktails including cellulolytic and auxiliary enzymes for increased cellulose digestion rate and yield.

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.

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Get in touch

ttz Bremerhaven
Water, Energy and Landscape Management

Am Lunedeich 12
27572 Bremerhaven

Phone: +49 (0) 471 80934-200
Fax: +49 (0) 471 80934-299
E-mail: info@ttz-bremerhaven.de

This project has received funding from the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 669055