Purpose

Butanol is an interesting biofuel and a product precursor, that could be obtained with acetone and ethanol via fermentation. The biofuels production has been identified as not economically competitive, thus, the parallel production of high value-added products, such as xylitol, could be an alternative to improve the profit. Xylitol can be produced from xylose, which might be considered as a coproduct in a second generation biorefinery.

Methods

This study presents a systematic biorefinery process design for the simultaneous acetone, butanol, ethanol (ABE) and xylitol production, based on experimental and simulation approaches. Experiments were performed for the pretreatment of sugarcane bagasse and ABE fermentation. The simulation part used the experimental results and experimental data from literature, to perform rigorous calculations of the ABE and xylitol production process. The economic analysis (EA) was performed relying on some indicators such as, the net present value (NPV) and payback period (PBP); EA includes several scenarios for producing only ABE and some scenarios for simultaneous ABE and xylitol production.

Results

The results showed that the combined butanol and xylitol production could reduce by 17% the selling price of butanol, compared with only producing butanol. The study also included the combustion of residual solids and carbon dioxide depletion analyses.

Conclusion

This approach illustrates the opportunity to perform a rigorous techno-economic analysis, to identify the feasibility of the process at industrial scale, based on realistic data. This approach was implemented for ABE and xylitol production, but it can be used to any other bioproduct.

Graphic Abstract

中文翻译：

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通过生物精炼平台生产丙酮，丁醇，乙醇和木糖醇：一种实验和模拟方法

目的

丁醇是一种有趣的生物燃料和产物前体，可以通过丙酮和乙醇发酵获得。已经确定生物燃料生产在经济上没有竞争力，因此，并行生产高附加值产品（如木糖醇）可以作为提高利润的替代方法。木糖醇可以由木糖生产，木糖可能被认为是第二代生物精炼厂的副产品。

方法

这项研究基于实验和模拟方法，提出了同时生产丙酮，丁醇，乙醇（ABE）和木糖醇的系统化生物精炼工艺设计。进行了甘蔗渣和ABE发酵的预处理实验。模拟部分使用了实验结果和来自文献的实验数据，对ABE和木糖醇生产过程进行了严格的计算。经济分析（EA）取决于一些指标，例如净现值（NPV）和投资回收期（PBP）；EA包括几种仅生产ABE的方案，以及一些同时生产ABE和木糖醇的方案。

结果

结果表明，与仅生产丁醇相比，丁醇和木糖醇的联合生产可将丁醇的销售价格降低17％。该研究还包括残留固体的燃烧和二氧化碳耗竭分析。

结论

这种方法说明了基于实际数据进行严格的技术经济分析，确定工业规模工艺可行性的机会。该方法已用于ABE和木糖醇生产，但可用于任何其他生物产品。

图形摘要