Fundamental Investigations on System-Level Cost Evaluation for Economic Viability of Cellulosic Biofuel Manufacturing

这项研究可以通过降低生产成本，扩大从木材和其他纤维素原料中生产乙醇。这将有助于解决能源短缺和全球变暖两大问题。因此，这项研究的成功将有助于提高美国乙醇制造业的经济可行性，减少对石油的依赖，并在减少温室气体排放方面造福环境和社会。在一个碳排放有限的世界里，这项研究将有助于绿化美国的交通部门，并为美国的可再生能源行业提供竞争优势。该项目将与研究生和本科生，特别是女学生和代表性不足的少数民族学生的培训紧密结合起来。这些想法和结果将通过课堂教学、会议报告和期刊出版物广泛传播。这笔赠款的研究目的是产生新的知识，利用主要个别制造过程之间的相互关系，建立纤维素生物燃料制造的系统级成本模型，并建立系统级成本效益决策的方法，以提高乙醇产量约束下的纤维素生物燃料制造的经济可行性。首先，将分析现有的实验结果，以获得各个纤维素生物燃料制造工艺之间的相互关系。然后，将这些相互关系用于构建纤维素生物燃料制造的系统级成本模型。在此模型的基础上，将建立一个经济有效的决策工具，在保持纤维素生物燃料生产的乙醇产量目标的同时，降低总体成本。最后，将对研究结果进行实验验证和可扩展性调查。

This research can enable expanded production of ethanol from wood and other cellulose-based feedstocks by lowering the cost of production. This will contribute to resolving two major issues: energy shortage and global warming. Consequently, the success of this research will help improve the economic viability of the U.S. ethanol manufacturing industry, reduce oil dependence, and benefit the environment and society in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. In a carbon-constrained world, this research will serve to green the U.S. transportation sector, and provide a competitive advantage to the U.S. renewable energy industry. This project will closely integrate with the training of graduate as well as undergraduate students, especially female and underrepresented minority students. The ideas and results will be broadly disseminated through classroom teachings, conference presentations, and journal publications. The research objective of this grant is to generate new knowledge to build a system-level cost model for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing utilizing the interrelations among major individual manufacturing processes and to establish the methodology for system-level cost-effective decision making to improve the economic viability of cellulosic biofuel manufacturing under the constraint of ethanol yield. First, existing experimental results will be analyzed to obtain the interrelations among individual cellulosic biofuel manufacturing processes. Then these obtained interrelations will be used to construct a system-level cost model for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing. Based on this model, a cost-effective decision making tool will be established to reduce the overall cost while maintaining the ethanol yield target of cellulosic biofuel manufacturing. Finally, experimental validations and scalability investigations of research results will be performed.