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Scale-Up of Ionic Liquid-Based Fractionation of Single and Mixed Feedstocks

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Abstract

Lignocellulosic biorefineries have tonnage and throughput requirements that must be met year round, and there is no single feedstock available in any given region that is capable of meeting the price and availability demands of the biorefineries. Ionic liquid (IL) pretreatment with certain ILs is receiving significant attentions as a potential process that enables fractionation of a wide range of feedstocks and produces high yields of fermentable sugars suitable for biofuel production. Building on the large-scale demonstration of a single herbaceous feedstock (switchgrass), this work extends scale-up of IL pretreatment to woody (eucalyptus) and mixed feedstock (mixtures of two) by 30-fold, relative to the bench scale (6 vs 0.2 L) at 10 % solid loading. The mixed feedstock recovered similar yields of glucan (99.7 %), xylan (62.8 %), and lignin (59.9 %) as switchgrass and eucalyptus at 6-L scale operation, and results of all three feedstocks are better than those obtained from small-scale studies. By integrating the process of IL pretreatment with efficient and scalable homogenization, washing, and product recovery system, IL contents in the recovered materials were decreased to 0.2 %, mitigating the risk to downstream enzymatic saccharification and microbial fermentation. Results indicate that mixed feedstock are viable and valuable resource to consider when assessing biomass availability and affordability for lignocellulosic biorefineries. This scale-up evaluation demonstrates that IL pretreatment technology is feedstock agnostic and can be effectively scaled to larger operations.

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Acknowledgments

ABPDU would like to acknowledge the funding support from Office of Biomass Program within the US DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and also the funding support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. JBEI would like to acknowledge the funding support from US DOE’s Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US DOE. The authors would like to thank the Idaho National Laboratory for providing the switchgrass and eucalyptus used in this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Emeryville, CA, USA

    Chenlin Li, Deepti Tanjore, Wei He, Jessica Wong & James L. Gardner

  2. Biological Systems Department, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID, USA

    Vicki S. Thompson

  3. Biofuels and Renewable Energy Technologies Department, Idaho Falls, ID, USA

    Neal A. Yancey

  4. Deconstruction Division, Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, USA

    Kenneth L. Sale, Blake A. Simmons & Seema Singh

  5. Biological and Materials Science Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA, USA

    Kenneth L. Sale, Blake A. Simmons & Seema Singh

Authors
  1. Chenlin Li
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  2. Deepti Tanjore
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  3. Wei He
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  4. Jessica Wong
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  5. James L. Gardner
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  6. Vicki S. Thompson
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  7. Neal A. Yancey
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  8. Kenneth L. Sale
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  9. Blake A. Simmons
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  10. Seema Singh
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Correspondence to Chenlin Li.

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Li, C., Tanjore, D., He, W. et al. Scale-Up of Ionic Liquid-Based Fractionation of Single and Mixed Feedstocks. Bioenerg. Res. 8, 982–991 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-015-9587-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-015-9587-0

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