Introduction of dehydration process into mechanochemical pretreatment for Production Bioethanol

Abstract

Ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass requires pretreatment methods to increase the efficiency of enzymatic saccharification and so establish the whole process as economically viable. Hydrothermal and/or wet disk milling is a mechano chemical process that operates under wet conditions, so the process water might increase the energy consumption of the distillation process. Application of a dehydration process to the mechano chemical pretreatment process of the bioethanol production system has been proposed for process energy saving and cost reduction. However, the dehydration process has problems with the loss of sugars eluted in the liquid phase during the hydrothermal process. This studydescribes the incorporation of a dehydration process into the mechano chemical pretreatment of the bioethanol production system. Introduction of the dehydration process resulted in 9-17% reduction of production cost and 43-57% reduction of process energy.