Distributed biofuels production using semicontinuous chemical processes

大规模的生物燃料生产需要大片的土地来供应必要的生物质(柳枝藤、油菜籽、玉米、木材等)。然而，生产设施越大，生物质必须运输得越远，导致燃料消耗、环境影响和运输成本增加。借鉴“购买当地食物”运动的理念，可以通过将大型设施替换为分布在支持土地区域的多个较小的生产设施来减少这种浪费。然而，目前生产设施本身的规模经济并不利于这一点。因此，这项提议寻求开发一种新型的生物燃料生产战略，称为半连续加工。半连续处理是一种新型的处理强化技术，它采用循环操作策略，与典型的连续操作策略相比，使用更少的设备来执行多个分离或反应步骤。这一点已经在其他情况下得到了证明，从而大大降低了小规模业务的成本。

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.