Simplified Method for the Measurement of Insoluble Solids in Pretreated Biomass Slurries

The biochemical conversion of cellulosic biomass to liquid transportation fuels includes the breakdown of biomass into its soluble, fermentable components. Pretreatment, the initial step in the conversion process, results in heterogeneous slurry comprised of both soluble and insoluble biomass compon...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Applied biochemistry and biotechnology Vol. 162; no. 4; pp. 975 - 987
Main Authors:	Weiss, Noah D, Stickel, Jonathan J, Wolfe, Jeffrey L, Nguyen, Quang A
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	New York New York : Humana Press Inc 01-10-2010 Humana Press Inc Springer Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:	Biochemistry Biological and medical sciences Biomass Biotechnology Biotechnology - methods Chemical engineering Chemistry Chemistry and Materials Science Dry matter Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology Hydrolysis Innovations Process engineering Slurries Solids Waste Products - analysis Fraction insoluble solids Pretreatment Biomass Corn stover Lignocellulosic ethanol Ethanol Fraction insoluble solidus Corn Lignocellulosics Method Vegetal waste
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Summary:	The biochemical conversion of cellulosic biomass to liquid transportation fuels includes the breakdown of biomass into its soluble, fermentable components. Pretreatment, the initial step in the conversion process, results in heterogeneous slurry comprised of both soluble and insoluble biomass components. For the purpose of tracking the progress of the conversion process, it is important to be able to accurately measure the fraction of insoluble biomass solids in the slurry. The current standard method involves separating the solids from the free liquor and then repeatedly washing the solids to remove the soluble fraction, a laborious and tedious process susceptible to operator variations. In this paper, we propose an alternative method for calculating the fraction of insoluble solids which does not require a washing step. The proposed method involves measuring the dry matter content of the whole slurry as well as the dry matter content in the isolated liquor fraction. We compared the two methods using three different pretreated biomass slurry samples and two oven-drying techniques for determining dry matter content, an important measurement for both methods. We also evaluated a large set of fraction insoluble solids data collected from previously analyzed pretreated samples. The proposed new method provided statistically equivalent results to the standard washing method when an infrared balance was used for determining dry matter content in the controlled measurement experiment. Similarly, in the large historical data set, there was no statistical difference shown between the wash and no-wash methods. The new method is offered as an alternative method for determining the fraction of insoluble solids.
Bibliography:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12010-009-8806-6 ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1
ISSN:	0273-2289 1559-0291
DOI:	10.1007/s12010-009-8806-6