Abstract

Huge wastewater generation is the major challenge of biorefinery technology for production of cellulosic ethanol. This study designed and verified a method for completely recycling of wastewater stream (the stillage liquid from the beer column) in cellulosic ethanol production by dry biorefining processing. When the stillage liquid was directly recycled to dry acid pretreatment operation, ethanol production gradually reduced after two recycles primarily because the inorganic compounds accumulated by around 139%. To ultimately solve this technical barrier, the stillage liquid was evaporated and condensed into distillated water, then recycled to the pretreatment for complete dry biorefining process. This strategy supported a stable cellulosic ethanol production, and the overall mass and heat balance confirmed that only 65% of the lignin residue consumption was used for wastewater evaporation with 35% surplus for electricity generation. This study provided a fully converged biorefining process with a closed-loop wastewater recycling.

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