Good morning

A promising technique is pretreatment with liquid hot water (LHW). Recently I applied it to hydrolyze mucilage and pulp of cardon (cactacea) and I produced excellent results, 68% of ethanol content after 8 days of fermentation with Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The tests were carried out in a reactor sealed at atmospheric pressure, with a temperature of 95 ° C and 15 minutes of duration.

Thanks Lissette

Did you estimate how much energy did you need to heat the water vs. how much energy you retained as ethanol?

If not - What was the water to biomass ratio and how much ethanol was obtained for biomass weight (what does 68% mean?)

Thanks

Yoram

Good afternoon Yoram.

Solutions were prepared, with a maximum concentration of 500g of biomass / L. On average 150mL of solution with 68% alcohol concentration were obtained in simple distillation systems with an average temperature of 80 ° C -95 ° C. The percentages of alcohol were evaluated in a distillation volume of 100 ml.

The alcoholic solution generated combustion with visible flame for 30 seconds (25mL of solution) but the caloric power of the alcohol was not determined.

I hope the information is useful

68% EtOH will burn nicely but is not sutible as transportation fuel. As of caloric value pure EtOH is ~25 MJ/kg or ~20MJ/L.

Do you know how much EtOH you got in the fermentatio, before distilation? How much EtOH per biomass weight?

Yoram Gerchman Steam explosion works best with the lignin based feedstocks and yes I have particularly tried this technology at a small scale for trying to digest the feedstocks for anaerbic digestion but do not have much idea about your question.