Distributed biofuels production using semicontinuous chemical processes

大规模的生物燃料生产需要大面积的土地来提供必要的生物质（柳枝稷、油菜籽、玉米、木材等）。然而，生产设施越大，生物质的运输距离就越远，导致燃料消耗、环境影响和运输成本增加。借鉴“购买本地食品”运动的理念，这种浪费可以通过在配套土地上分布多个较小的生产设施来取代大型设施来减少。然而，目前生产设施本身的规模经济并不支持这种做法。因此，该提案寻求开发一种新型的生物燃料生产策略，称为半连续加工。半连续处理是一种新型的加工强化技术，它采用循环操作策略，在比典型连续操作策略更少的设备中完成多个分离或反应步骤。这在其他情况下已被证明可以大大减少小规模作业的费用。

Large-scale biofuel production requires a large geographical area of land to supply the necessary biomass (switchgrass, rapeseed, corn, wood, etc.). However, the larger a production facility gets, the farther biomass has to be transported, leading to increased fuel consumption, environmental impact, and cost of transport. Borrowing from the philosophy of the "buy local food" movement, this waste can be reduced by replacing large facilities with multiple, smaller production facilities distributed over the supporting land area. However, the economies-of-scale of the production facilities themselves do not favor this at present. Therefore, this proposal seeks to develop a new type of production strategy for biofuels, called semicontinuous processing. Semicontinuous processing is a novel processing intensification technique which uses a cyclic operating strategy to perform multiple separation or reaction steps in less equipment than typical continuous operating strategies. This has been shown in other contexts to significantly reduce the costs of operating at smaller scales.