Process ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass

Cellulose ethanol has the potential to displace a significant amount of petroleum in the United States, reducing the nation s dependence on foreign imports (1). The biologic processes favored for producing ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass require a pretreatment step before high yields can be realized, and the accessibility of cellulose to cellulase enzymes has... 

Process Design Ethanol from Lignocellulosic Biomass 449... 

Tolan, J.S. (2005) logon s demonstration process for producing ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass, in Biorefineries-Industrial Processes and Products (eds B. Kamm, P. Gruber, and M. Kamm), Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Weinheim, pp. 193-207. 

Physical property data for many of the key components used in the simulation for the ethanol-from-lignocellulose process are not available in the standard ASPEN-Plus property databases (11). Indeed, many of the properties necessary to successfully simulate this process are not available in the standard biomass literature. The physical properties required by ASPEN-Plus are calculated from fundamental properties such as liquid, vapor, and solid enthalpies and density. In general, because of the need to distill ethanol and to handle dissolved gases, the standard nonrandom two-liquid (NRTL) or renon route is used. This route, which includes the NRTL liquid activity coefficient model, Henry s law for the dissolved gases, and Redlich-Kwong-Soave equation of state for the vapor phase, is used to calculate properties for components in the liquid and vapor phases. It also uses the ideal gas at 25°C as the standard reference state, thus requiring the heat of formation at these conditions. 

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