What is it about?
One of the main obstacles to the commercial development of biological based production processes for biofuels is "end-product toxicity". End-product toxicity refers to the phenomenon that biofuels (such as acetone, biodiesel, n-butanol, ethanol, methane, and methanol) are extremely toxic to the biocatalysts that are used in their manufacture. Simple put, it is not possible to obtain a high concentration of product because that high concentration would kill the biological catalyst so that there would not have been the catalyst there to produce the high volume of product.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Alcohol based biofuels, such as bio-butanol, have considerable potential to reduce the demand for petrochemical fuels. However, one of the main obstacles to the commercial development of biological based production processes of biofuels is end-product toxicity to the biocatalyst. In order to increase production of biofuels it is important to understand the bottle-necks that are currently reducing their potential to decrease our need for fuels derived from petrochemicals.
Perspectives
Two common ways to measure the performance of a biological reactor are to determine the yield of the performance and/or the maximum reactor productivity. In a continuously stirred biological reactor the yield is the concentration of the product in the stream leaving the reactor divided by the concentration of feed in the stream entering the reactor. The reactor productivity is the concentration of the product in the exit stream multiplied by the flow rate. This is the mass of product leaving the reactor per unit time. We use our mathematical model to quantify how these characterisations depend upon the degree of product toxicity and the concentration of the feed. These results can be used to provide a baseline to assess the effectiveness of novel reactor designs which are aimed at reducing the adverse effects of end product toxicity.
Mark Nelson
University of Wollongong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Mathematical Model for End-Product Toxicity, Chemical Product and Process Modeling, December 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cppm-2017-0061.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
