Portable Biomass Fuel Reactor

The U.S. Air Force is interested in processing biomass to produce liquid fuels in its facilities around the world. This would help lessen the environmental impact due to expanding landfills as well as help reduce the use of petroleum oil. Processing the cellulose in this biomass into ethanol is one viable option to meet these requirements where the cellulose is first hydrolyzed into glucose that is subsequently fermented into ethanol fuel. Large scale industrial processes are aiming to accomplish these process steps, however, the high costs and complex process units make it difficult to scale the process to smaller biomass operations more suited for Air Force needs. To this end, Reactive Innovations, LLC proposes to develop a modular biomass hydrolysis reactor that can efficiently breakdown and convert cellulose and hemicellulose into fermentable sugars using a wide variety of biomass feedstocks. During the Phase I program, we will show the merits of our hydrolysis reactor and its applicability to smaller bioethanol production for suitcase to trailer-size operations. A Phase II program will scale this reactor to operational prototypes that can be combined with the other pertinent unit operations for producing bioethanol fuel.