(546f) Integrated Pathway Optimization for Biorefineries

Integrated Pathway Optimization for Biorefineries

Pascual Eduardo Murillo-Alvarado,¹
Ismael Leonardo Razo¹, José María Ponce-Ortega,¹
Medardo Serna-González,¹Mahmoud El-Halwagi²

¹Chemical
Engineering Department, Universidad
Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Mich., 58030, México.

²Chemical
Engineering Department,
Texas A&M University, 3122 College Station, TX, USA, 77843-3122

            The depletion of petrochemical resources
in addition to the associated huge green house gas emissions have promoted the
use of alternative sources of energy. Biofuels are an innovative alternative
source of energy that help to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally,
biomass can be used to produce a lot of high valued bioproducts in addition to
biofules inside a facility called biorefinery through chemical, physical and
biological ways. This way, recently several processing routes have been
proposed for the biomass conversion considering different row materials;
however, due to the huge number of possibilities is difficult to determine the
best route to produce a given product from a given feedstock. Recently, several
approaches have considered the pathway optimization to obtain a given product
from a given feedstock; however, what is missing the simultaneous optimization
for the feedstock selection as well as the products and the pathway (see Figure
1). Therefore, this work proposes a new optimization model to find the
optimal biorefinery pathway considering the simultaneous optimization for the
pathway as well as the optimal selection of feedstocks and the products, the
models takes into account the available bioresources as well as the product
demands. In addition, the objectives for the optimization model are the
simultaneous maximization for the total profit as well as the minimization for
the environmental impact considering the greenhouse gas emissions, the number
of processing steps is also considered in the optimization process because
these are directly related to the associated risk. The optimization model is
applied to a case study considering several bioresources and products for the
case of Mexico, where can be identified simultaneously the feedstock, products
and pathway for the different scenarios analyzed.

Figure 1.
Addressed problem.