Designing the perfect plant feedstock for biofuel production: Using the whole buffalo to diversify fuels and products
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Development of sustainable and scalable technologies to convert lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels is critical to achieving carbon neutrality. The potential of transgenic bioenergy crops as a renewable source of sugars and lipids has been demonstrated at bench-scale. However, scaling up these processes is important for holistic analysis. Here proof-of-concept for chemical-free hydrothermal pretreatment of transgenic energycane-oilcane line L13 at an industrially relevant scale to recover vegetative lipids along with cellulosic sugars is presented. Here, pilot-scale processing of 97 kg of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 stems and high solids pretreatment of bagasse enhanced the recovery of cellulosic glucose and xylose by 5-fold as compared to untreated bagasse and helped in the enrichment of vegetative lipids in the biomass residues which allowed its recovery at the end of the bioprocess. Palmitic and oleic acids were the predominant fatty acids (FAs) extracted from stems and leaves. The processing did not affect lipid composition. The efficiency of lipid recovery from untreated biomass was 75.9% which improved to 88.7% upon pretreatment. The vegetative tissues of transgenic energycane-oilcane L13 contained 0.42 metric tons/hectare of lipids. Processing vegetative tissues yielded 0.38 metric tons/hectare of lipids. This approaches an oil yield similar to soybean (global average 0.44 metric tons/hectare) and is almost twice as high as the oil yield from sugarcane engineered to hyperaccumulate lipids (0.20 metric tons/hectare). The study suggests that further optimization by state-of-the-art metabolic engineering and biomass processing can establish transgenic bioenergy crops for commercial drop-in fuel production.
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Achieving high powder packing density is critical in binder jet additive manufacturing (BJAM), as it directly influences the final part density, mechanical properties, and sintering behavior. Multi-modal powder blends, which combine particles of different sizes, have been explored as a strategy to optimize packing efficiency and minimize defects. In this study, bimodal and trimodal powder blends were obtained by mixing silicon carbide powder in three different sizes. These results show that increased powder density is achievable with bimodal powder blends but is reduced in trimodal blends, and it was found that a 13 % increase in the powder tap density was achieved using a bimodal blend of powder. The powder size distribution of the bimodal blend was measured at various stages during binder jet additive manufacturing and, no measurable powder separation occurred even after eight prints. Altogether, this study shows limited advantage to trimodal powder blends but good promise for bimodal blends for increasing printed density while maintaining reusability in the binder jet process.
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Meeting the increased demand for rare earth elements and beyond primary mined ore. Secondary sources like phosphogypsum, coal fly ash, used nuclear fuel, and electronic waste are concentrated sources of critical minerals. One strategy for a resilient supply chain is to decentralize sourcing and hydrometallurgical processing of metals. Rotating packed beds (RPBs) for solid-phase extraction and liquid-liquid extraction are gaining momentum for their ability to increase process throughput by 5-10x the state of the art. In conclusion, this review discusses advances in hydrometallurgical RPB processes and opportunities for implementation in distributed metals production.
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Additive manufacturing (AM) promises to redesign traditional manufacturing by enabling the ultimate in agility for rapid component design changes in commercial products and for fabricating complex integrated parts. Here, by significantly increasing quality and yield of metallic alloy powders, the pace for design, development, and deployment of the most promising AM approaches can be greatly accelerated, resulting in rapid commercialization of these advanced manufacturing methods. By successful completion of a critical suite of processing research tasks that are intended to greatly enhance gas atomized powder quality and the precision and efficiency of powder production, researchers can help promote continued rapid growth of AM. Finally, other powder-based or spray-based advanced manufacturing methods could also benefit from these research outcomes, promoting the next wave of sustainable manufacturing technologies for conventional and advanced materials.
The global goal to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions has resulted in research focused on environment friendly and socio-economically sustainable renewable energy sources. However, commercial production of bio-energy is constrained by biomass supply uncertainty and associated costs. This study presents an integrated approach to determining the optimal biofuel supply chain considering biomass yield uncertainty. A two-stage stochastic mixed integer linear programming is utilized to minimize the expected system cost while incorporating yield uncertainty in the strategic level decisions related to biomass production and biorefinery investment. Applicability of the stochastic model is illustrated through a case study of switchgrass-based biofuel in west Tennessee.
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The economic availability of biomass resources is a critical component in evaluating the commercial viability of biofuels. To evaluate projected farmgate prices and grower payments needed to procure 295 million dry Mg (325 million dry tons) of biomass in the U.S. by 2022, this research employs POLYSYS, an economic model of the U.S. agriculture sector. A price-run simulation suggests that a farmgate price of $58.42 Mg{sup -1} ($53.00 dry ton{sup -1}) is needed to procure this supply, while a demand-run simulation suggests that prices of $34.56 and $71.61 Mg{sup -1} ($30.00 and $62.00 dry ton{sup -1}) in are needed in 2012 and 2022, respectively, to procure the same supply, under baseline yield assumptions. Grower payments are reported as farmgate price minus resource-specific harvest costs.
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This study evaluates the bioethanol potential in response to irrigation (IR) and non-irrigation (NIR) of oilcane (OC) during a seasonal drought prior harvest. The juice was extracted through mechanical pressing of stems and fermented by Ethanol Red® yeast to produce first-generation bioethanol. Hydrothermal pretreatment followed by enzymatic hydrolysis of bagasse was performed to produce monomeric sugars from structural carbohydrates. The hydrolysates were fermented with engineered yeast for second-generation bioethanol production. The irrigated oilcane juice (276.3 ± 8.9 g/L) constitutes higher sugar concentrations than non-irrigated oilcane juice (236.5 ± 2.2 g/L). The enzymatic hydrolysis of IR-OC and NIR-OC pretreated bagasse yielded similar concentrations of 247.5 ± 2.22 and 249.7 ± 4.98 g/L fermentable sugars. Industry-relevant bioethanol titers of ≥99 g/L and ≥75 g/L were achieved from juice and hydrolysates, respectively. Therefore, the non-irrigation regime did not impact the 1G and 2G bioethanol titers. However, the overall bioethanol yield can be lower due to the reduction of stem yield (8 %) per hectare.
Catalytic hydrogenation is an attractive approach to produce green fuels and chemicals. The building blocks for these processes may be effectively produced from renewable power via direct electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide in an aqueous media. For the first time, the impact of increasing the local proton concentration of cobalt porphyrin was examined by synthesizing new cobalt porphyrins 2, Co(o-OCH3)TPP and cobalt porphyrin 3, Co(o-OH)TPP. Cobalt porphyrins coated on carbon paper converted carbon dioxide and water into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide in an aqueous electrolyte at near neutral pH. Increasing the local proton availability of the commercial cobalt porphyrin 1, accelerates hydrogen generation under heterogeneous conditions across the range of potentials tested (-0.85 to -1.5 V vs. Ag/AgCl) and demonstrates high Faradaic efficiencies (ca. 90%) at low over-potentials (ca. 540 mV). The culmination of this work can help identify key parameters that facilitate generation of sustainable reagents for catalytic hydrogenation under practical and scalable conditions.
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