Read this article to learn about Cellulosic Bioprocessing and Co-Product Utility!
When cellulosic’s are abundantly available and other fermentable sugar containing resources are scanty cellulose cleavage bioprocessing leading to fermentable sugar or hydrolyzate production has been thought to be an alternate route of renewable resource availability through resource engineering approach.
Thus cellulose saccharification and utilization gained importance.
Also cellulosic cleavage gives fragments of cellulose which have potentials for high tech applications. One of the major approaches of cellulose bioprocessing has been for ethanol production (Fig. 13.5) using various types of cellulosic residues.
The reason why this, alternative ethanol production from renewable residual biomass has been given so much importance relates to potential of ethanol in production of various ranges of chemical feed stocks as given in Fig. 13.6.
An integrated process biotechnology of lignocellulose bioconversion has been developed. Besides ethanol production by this technology it generates, as stated, many co-products. Utility and value addition scopes of these co-products are very wide (Fig. 13.7).
One of the major high value co-product is lignin. Industrial value addition scopes with lignin conversion are also very large (Fig. 13.8). After bioconversion of pretreated lignocellulose the residual cellulose, i.e. hemicellulose has been observed to be a very useful co-product. The property based high tech application of the hemicellulose as given in Table 13.10 indicates its potential.
Also as shown in Table 13.7 cellulases is an important co-product of the integrated process biotechnology. The presence of different components in these cellulases as shown in Fig. 13.9 shows that it also has an industrial value addition scope. Although cellulase from various sources have wide application scopes, more rigorous research is in progress towards characterization of cellulolytic complex (cellulosome) produced by prokaryotic cellulases as well as for innovation of further application of the enzyme complex.
