How does enzyme hydrolysis work?
Production of woody feedstock into a fuel source while environmentally friendly is in many ways cost-prohibitive. Logging residues from the waste of the marketable trees are chipped on the logging deck and transported to the processing plant for use.
This collection process, while efficient, depends on the market of the actual lumber. Not all wood lumber feedstock plants are located in a cost-beneficial range of the logging decks. Thus making transportation to pre-conversion facilities a logistical challenge. The sorting of the wooden feedstock is also a must as the chemical procedure to break the wood into the usable sugary form is slightly different for hard versus softwood, which varies from other types of feedstock.
Wooden feedstocks can be harvested or acquired as a byproduct of production and can come in three forms bark (mulch), coarse (chips), and fines (shavings-sawdust). Wooden feedstocks come from wood, as the name suggests, and is acquired by collecting wood chips, sawdust, or leftover branches from the harvesting of trees, thus reducing the waste from lumber production.
Enzymatic hydrolysis
The technology used to break down the lignin and structural carbohydrates to release the carbohydrates stored with-in biomass of different woody stock, known as enzymatic hydrolysis. Adding other enzymes to the woody products in many various cocktails designed to find the best way to break the products down to usable glucose and make the woody by-products useful in commercialization.
Wooden feedstock goes through conversion in a two-step, one chemical treatment, and enzymatic hydrolysis takes wood fiber and converts it into glucose. The resulting product is ethanol, which is fermented from the sugars in the tree cells, the second step. The link between the hardness of the wood and the accessibility of the sugars can be traced. However, chemical treatment and enzymatic hydrolysis, and microbial conversion are the same in each type of wood.
Scientists have developed a procedure that extracts the cellulose that is naturally contained in wood and wood by-products. Dry wood tissue contains cellulose polymers; to access the cellulose, the feedstock must be pretreated yet not be overtreated to breakdown the polymers to render them useless. Like all cellulose, polymers occur naturally in nature; xylose has two forms D and L, which is the manufactured mirror image or the D-enantiomer.
Environmental microbiome
Researchers have discovered that combining the naturally occurring D-enantiomer with the manufactured L-form makes a much stronger polymer. The use of combinations that can be used to create sustainable plastic products for everyday use. The impact of this groundbreaking work on the environmental microbiome will lessen the need for fossil fuels and provide a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuel derivatives such as plastics.
While the technology used to convert woody feedstock from a waste product to a biofuel or plastic tube sounds like an environmentally sound step into the future that will sustain this microbiome that we call earth, there is a direct link between a cost-effective product and environmentally sound.
The need to lessen fossil fuel consumption and find an environmentally friendly alternative is real, but the demand for the alternative product to be available to the masses. And for the product to be open to the groups, the cost of production must be kept in hand.
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Read more about the conversion of biofuel or transportation fuels and energy conversion.