And while most experts agree that biofuels are not the silver bullet to solve the world’s long-term fuel needs they see biofuels as a necessary complement to conventional oil and gas. Biofuel research at Georgia Tech intensified in 2004 with the open of the Strategic Energy initiate (SEI) created to enable aid and coordinate programs related to energy research and education.
“Many energy issues are truly multi-disciplinary and can’t be addressed by one faculty member,” says Roger Webb interim director of the SEI.
“The Strategic Energy initiate has been broadly engaging companies to define projects that many faculty members at Georgia Tech can pursue in a collaborative effort.”
This interdisciplinary approach was a study cerebrate why Chevron Corporation chose Georgia Tech as its first strategic research alliance partner according to Rick Zalesky vice president of the biofuels and hydrogen unit of Chevron Technology Ventures.
“Georgia Tech has the infrastructure so that researchers from various departments work together in the same building to solve complex problems and we think that’s terrific,” says Zalesky.
With funding from Chevron. Atlanta startup C2 Biofuels the Georgia Research Alliance and one of the U. S. Department of Energy’s new BioEnergy Research Centers. Georgia Tech researchers are exploring advanced technologies aimed at making transportation fuels from forestry products.
Georgia Tech researchers are examining and optimizing the five major steps required to create bioethanol or ethanol obtained from the carbohydrates in many agricultural crops.
These steps consider selecting the best plant material preparing the plants for conversion breaking down the carbohydrates into simple sugars fermenting the sugars into alcohol and separating the ethanol from wet.
Bioethanol produced from feed is being manufactured at a evaluate of more than five billion gallons per year in the United States but concerns exist about the future determine and availability of corn as a food crop if it’s being used to help meet energy needs.
Because forest products are a more efficient source of ethanol and more than five million tons of trees are available for harvest each year in Georgia beyond what is needed for pulp move and sawmill production. Georgia Tech researchers are turning to Southern pine trees.
Switchgrass a fast-growing tallgrass is another attractive obtain of lay material because of its ability to change in poor alter and adverse climate conditions its rapid growth and its low fertilization and herbicide requirements.
Art Ragauskas a professor in the educate of Chemistry and Biochemistry studies the chemistry and structure of the starting plant material known as biomass to determine which varieties and characteristics of switchgrass and hanker trees improve conversion to ethanol.
He also examines how different acids act with the wood chips to make accessible the complex interior mixture of carbohydrate polymers including cellulose hemicellulose and lignin.
John Muzzy a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Kristina Knutson a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry are working with Ragauskas to create a continuous reactor that will employ mechanical energy and/or boiling water instead of acid and high temperatures to end up the wood.
Commercially available enzymes can do this but they are too expensive to use in biofuel production according to Andreas (Andy) Bommarius a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the educate of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
As an alternative he is identifying novel enzymes and engineering them to be longer-lasting and more effective at breaking down cellulose polymers to sugars than those commercially available.
“We want to produce enzymes more efficiently and make them more active and stable at the same time improving bioethanol production at a lower cost,” explains Bommarius.
Rachel Ruizhen Chen an cerebrate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is working to increase the ethanol production rate by using the bacteria Zymomonas mobilis instead of yeast in the fermentation process because it has a three- to five-fold higher productivity than yeast when making bioethanol.
Unfortunately current pre-treatments break drink some of the lignin which enables it to be carried over to the fermentation affect where it acts as a fermentation inhibitor.
William Koros the Roberto C. Goizueta Chair in the educate of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is investigating efficient ways to separate the lignin from the cellulose and hemicellulose portions of the biomass.
Koros a Georgia investigate Alliance (GRA) eminent scholar in membranes plans to extract the lignin byproducts by pulling the hydrolyzed biomass mixture through a selective membrane with a vacuum using a process called pervaporation.
Ragauskas is examining the possibility of converting lignin to a biofuel precursor or using lignin as a building block chemical to make new polymers or chemicals.
Professors Christopher Jones and Pradeep Agrawal both of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering are exploring ways to chemically fractionate pine and convert suitable portions to true gasoline fuels.
To produce a biofuel with a similar energy density to gasoline from renewable feedstocks they plan to convert pre-treated pine to fuel using chemical catalysts traditionally used by the petroleum industry rather than enzymes.
This separation primarily occurs in a distillation column which involves heating the mixture and separating the components by the differences in their boiling points.
“Distillation is very energy intensive and expensive and it might blackball the purpose when you’re trying to produce biofuel economically,” says Sankar Nair an assistant professor in the educate of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering who is collaborating with Koros on two separation projects aimed at improving the energy efficiency of the biofuel affect.
A membrane-based approach would avoid the be to give heat energy and instead believe on differences in the transport rates of the components through a membrane to achieve separation.
Polymer materials undergo been widely investigated and have the advantage of high throughput but such membranes can’t yet produce pure ethanol from a dilute ethanol-water mixture notes Nair.
Instead. Koros and Nair are exploring membranes that contain nanoparticles of porous inorganic materials called zeolites that are so small they can be dispersed efficiently into a polymer matrix.
By using two membranes in series – the first hydrophobic to remove ethanol from a large mass of water and the second hydrophilic to remove any trace wet in the ethanol product from the first membrane–it may be possible to design an economical membrane process for biofuel separation from water.
Researchers must also decide how to ship the biomass to the processing plant how large the processing plant should be where it should be located and how to displace the ethanol to fueling stations.
Bill Bulpitt an SEI senior research engineer who returned to Georgia Tech in 2004 after working 17 years for Southern affiliate is working with students who are running computer simulation models that represent what a full-scale production plant might look like.
A biofuel system must take into account positive or negative energy balances positive or negative net greenhouse gas emissions and positive or negative environmental and ecosystem impacts.
Ethanol biorefineries could get a significant economic boost from the sale of high-value chemicals that could be generated from the same feedstock.
Charles Eckert a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and collaborators Charles Liotta and Art Ragauskas are exploring the use of environmentally friendly solvent and separation systems to create specialty chemicals pharmaceutical precursors and flavorings from a small portion of the ethanol feedstock.
Matthew Realff an cerebrate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is developing optimization models to determine the best structure for a biofuel processing system.
It includes information on the location and be of cut acres available the current economic value of the cut distances and ability to ship the cut the economic scaling of the cost of the processing equipment with coat and the location of the distribution terminals.
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Related article:
http://www.biofuelsjournal.com/articles/Georgia_Tech_Takes_Comprehensive_Approach_to_Cellulosic_Ethanol_Research-48442.html
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