Development of a novel twin-screw extruder for resource recovery and renewable energy production from lignocellulose biomass and industrial organic wastes

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This project capitalizes on the previous success of Greenfield Ethanol (GFE) researchers who have been working on developing cost effective process to enzymatically hydrolyze and ferment lignocellulose biomass into ethanol, culminating in the development of a patent-pending equipment - a highly modified twin-screw extruder (TSE) - used to execute its pretreatment process, and to recover the clean sugars in an economic way. In addition to offering a pretreatment platform, GreenField's twin screw extruder also offers a continuous solid-liquid separation capability, that has multiple, potential industrial applications. This project addresses the scale-up challenges that have to be overcome to further develop this process including but not limited to the treatment of the TSE waste streams, the viability of the process for other wastes i.e. municipal wastewater treatment biosolids, organic fraction of municipal solid wastes, and hog manure, as well as the real-time performance during continuous treatment of various pulp and paper wastes. The scope of the project includes the design, fabrication,and testing of a demo-size TSE at GFE with various agricultural, municipal, and pulp and paper wastes at GFE in Chatham, Ontario, as well mobilization of the mobile unit for on-site testing at three pulp and paper mills in Ontario. The process development will be supported by extensive fermentation studies on the extracted C5 sugars from the TSE, as well as anerobic digestion of both the sugar-rich and the solids-rich streams of the TSE to recover biohydrogen and biomethane, reduce oranic pollutants, and destroy solids to reduce disposal costs. It is anticipated that this three-year project will culminate in the development of a novel technology that can extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic wastes, thereby improving the economics of 2nd generation bioethanol production, as well as reducing environmental pollution and enhancing bioenergy recovery.