Scale-up and evaluation of high solid ionic liquid pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis of switchgrass

Biotechnology for Biofuels

Chenlin Li²  Deepti Tanjore²  Wei He²  Jessica Wong²  James L Gardner²  Kenneth L Sale¹  Blake A Simmons¹  Seema Singh¹ 

[1] Biological and Materials Science Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA, USA

[2] Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Emeryville, CA, USA

关键词: Inhibition;    Viscosity;    High solid loading;    Ionic liquid;    Saccharification;    Pretreatment;    Scale-up;   

Others  :  797771
DOI  :  10.1186/1754-6834-6-154

 received in 2013-05-20, accepted in 2013-10-07,  发布年份 2013

【 摘 要 】

Background

Ionic liquid (IL) pretreatment is receiving significant attention as a potential process that enables fractionation of lignocellulosic biomass and produces high yields of fermentable sugars suitable for the production of renewable fuels. However, successful optimization and scale up of IL pretreatment involves challenges, such as high solids loading, biomass handling and transfer, washing of pretreated solids and formation of inhibitors, which are not addressed during the development stages at the small scale in a laboratory environment. As a first in the research community, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, in collaboration with the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit, a Department of Energy funded facility that supports academic and industrial entities in scaling their novel biofuels enabling technologies, have performed benchmark studies to identify key challenges associated with IL pretreatment using 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate and subsequent enzymatic saccharification beyond bench scale.

Results

Using switchgrass as the model feedstock, we have successfully executed 600-fold, relative to the bench scale (6 L vs 0.01 L), scale-up of IL pretreatment at 15% (w/w) biomass loading. Results show that IL pretreatment at 15% biomass generates a product containing 87.5% of glucan, 42.6% of xylan and only 22.8% of lignin relative to the starting material. The pretreated biomass is efficiently converted into monosaccharides during subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis at 10% loading over a 150-fold scale of operations (1.5 L vs 0.01 L) with 99.8% fermentable sugar conversion. The yield of glucose and xylose in the liquid streams were 94.8% and 62.2%, respectively, and the hydrolysate generated contains high titers of fermentable sugars (62.1 g/L of glucose and 5.4 g/L cellobiose). The overall glucan and xylan balance from pretreatment and saccharification were 95.0% and 77.1%, respectively. Enzymatic inhibition by [C₂mim][OAc] at high solids loadings requires further process optimization to obtain higher yields of fermentable sugars.

Conclusion

Results from this initial scale up evaluation indicate that the IL-based conversion technology can be effectively scaled to larger operations and the current study establishes the first scaling parameters for this conversion pathway but several issues must be addressed before a commercially viable technology can be realized, most notably reduction in water consumption and efficient IL recycle.

【 授权许可】

   
2013 Li et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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