Small-sized biorefineries as strategy to add value to sugarcane bagasse

NICOLÁS MARTÍN CLAUSER; SOLEDAD GUTIERREZ; MARÍA CRISTINA AREA; FERNANDO ESTEBAN FELISSIA; MARÍA EVANGELINA VALLEJOS

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH & DESIGN

INST CHEMICAL ENGINEERS

Año: 2016

0263-8762

Small-sized biorefineries are not capital intensive and have lower transportation cost, lessermovements of liquid and solid streams, and lower heat transfer problems than high-sizedones. In this work, different scenarios were investigated in order to determine technicaland economic viability of different processes to produce valuable products from sugarcanebagasse by small-sized biorefineries. Different alternatives were evaluated, as furfural andxylitol production from hemicelluloses, as well as energy generation and medium-densityfibreboard (MDF) production from the residual solid after hemicelluloses hydrolysis. Exper-imental data obtained by the authors in previous works were used for pretreatment steps,and updated literature data was used for the other processes. A simplified kinetic model wasdeveloped for the extraction of xylose, and unit operations processes were selected and sim-ulated. The most profitable option was determined for hemicelluloses use. In addition, costsand benefits that could be obtained exploiting the residual solid feedstock were estimated.The economic evaluation shows that recovery periods are extensive in both scenarios. How-ever, optimization of different steps as liquid to solid ratio of pretreatment, evaporation, orfermentation, could represent attractive and innovative alternatives in order to reduce therecovery periods of capital costs.