People who maintain ponds and lakes will know how much of a nuisance water hyacinth is. Sure, this aquatic weed is nice to look at, but it is considered a pest in many countries.
Thanks to the researchers at Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur (IIT – Kharagpur), water hyacinth – which contains up to 50 per cent hemicelluloses – can now be used as an economical and abundant source of biofuel.
The research, highlighted in a recent issue of the Nature Scientific Reports, claims that the pore scale phenomena can be used to result in a four-fold increase in the yield of fermentable sugars and bioethanol from hemicelluloses.[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
The study explains that the secret to rapidly producing soluble sugars required for bioethanol production from hemicelluloses lies in their smallest scale – the pores. This was unknown till now, hence hindering biofuel productivity.
According to the article, the key to produce commercially viable, low carbon footprint biofuels is to supplement cellulosic ethanol with hemicellulosic alcohols.
While cellulose is often used as biofuel sources, hemicelluloses are often ignored, mainly because surface reactions are capable of releasing only 25 per cent of the soluble sugars from the hemicellulose matrix for bioethanol production.
“It turns out that three quarters of the soluble sugars we obtain for generation of bioethanol are produced from the pore-scale reactions.
“So increasing the polymer’s porosity and degree of swelling will enhance the deconstruction of hemicelluloses from plant cell walls, thus increasing bioethanol,” said Professor Saikat Chakraborty, faculty at the Department of Chemical Engineering, and lead researcher of the Bioenergy Research Group at IIT Kharagpur in a press release.
“Hemicelluloses are the second most abundant natural polymer on earth – after cellulose – and a new technology engendered from this pore-scale phenomena could rapidly produce biofuels from locally available plant sources” added Chakraborty.
The average cellulose to hemicellulose ratio in plant cell walls is approximately 2:1, suggesting that supplementing cellulosic fuels with hemicellulosic ones would enhance biofuel productivity and cost-effectiveness by more than 50 per cent.
Simultaneous production of cellulosic and hemicellulosic fuels from the same source would considerably improve the combined Net Energy Value (energy content of ethanol minus energy input) from what it presently is for cellulosic ethanol (about 21.5 MJ/lit).
Apart from water-hyacinth, hemicellulose based bioethanol can also be produced from other low cost materials, like grasses, red and green algae, etc., which have 2.5 to 3 times more hemicellulose than cellulose.
Scientists at IIT Kharagpur’s Chemical Engineering Department and PK Sinha Centre for Bioenergy are working to transform these fundamental insights into new biofuel technologies that would help combat climate change.
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