STTR Phase I: Conversion of food waste to biofuels using an anaerobic membrane bioreractor

这个小企业技术转让（STTR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是一个具有成本效益的，商业上可行的，现场处理食物垃圾和能源回收的替代工艺。 在美国，近40%的食物被浪费，相当于1650亿美元的食物损失加上食品生产中使用的相关水、能源、化学品和劳动力。 食物垃圾的处理涉及额外的成本并导致环境污染，例如垃圾填埋场中腐烂的食物垃圾占美国甲烷排放量的很大一部分，甲烷是一种强大的温室气体。 此外，食物废物流含有大量的化学能，这些化学能也在其处置过程中损失。 回收食物垃圾中的能量，在生物燃料和化学品的形式，在这个项目中提出，将提供有效的管理食物垃圾问题，降低食物垃圾处理成本，同时生产有用的products.This STTR第一阶段项目提出开发和展示一种新的，固定化梭菌细胞膜生物反应器为基础的连续工艺的性能，将食物垃圾转化为丁醇。 传统的基于搅拌罐发酵反应器的食物垃圾转化方法表现出低丁醇浓度以及生产率。 所提出的方法将通过将梭菌细胞固定在多孔介质上来解决常规方法的技术障碍，以显著增加细胞培养密度，并因此增加丁醇生产率和转化效率。 此外，通过从反应介质中分离丁醇，反应器中再循环的丁醇浓度最小化，这降低了丁醇毒性。 生物质分离中的膜污染问题将通过“开放通道”膜组件设计来解决，以将生物质分离并再循环到生物反应器。 采用渗透蒸发膜从反应器稀流出物中回收丁醇的能量需求比传统的蒸馏方法降低一个数量级。 所提出的努力的目的是证明一个稳定的状态下连续的整合过程中，优化后的个别组件将食物垃圾转化为丁醇。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project will be a cost-effective, commercially viable, alternative process for on-site treatment of food waste and energy recovery. In the U.S., nearly 40% of food is wasted with $165 billion equivalent loss of food plus associated water, energy, chemicals, and labor used in food production. Disposal of the food waste involves additional costs and causes environmental pollution, e.g. rotting food waste in landfills accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas. Moreover, food waste streams contain a substantial amount of chemical energy that also is lost by its disposal. Recovering energy in food waste in the form of biofuel and chemicals, as proposed in this project, will provide efficient management of food waste problem reducing food waste disposal costs while producing useful products.This STTR Phase I project proposes to develop and demonstrate the performance of a novel, immobilized clostridia cell membrane bioreactor-based continuous process to convert food waste to butanol. The conventional stirred-tank fermentation reactor-based food waste conversion process exhibits low butanol concentration as well as productivity. The proposed process will address the technical barriers of the conventional process by immobilizing the clostridia cells on porous media to dramatically increase cell culture density, and, consequently, butanol productivity and conversion efficiency. In addition, by separating butanol from the reaction media, recycled butanol concentration is minimized in the reactor, which alleviates butanol toxicity. The membrane fouling issues in biomass separation will be addressed by an "open channel" membrane module design to separate and recycle biomass to the bioreactor. The energy requirement for recovery of butanol from dilute reactor effluent will be reduced by an order of magnitude over the conventional distillation by using a pervaporation membrane. The objective of the proposed effort is to demonstrate a steady state continuous integrated process for converting food waste to butanol after optimizing individual components.