Thomas Ingram

Latest developments have shown that the chemical industry has to utilize a wider range of resources in order to stay competitive. Renewable resources like lignocellulosic materials have a huge potential for the production of fine and platform chemicals. The processing of these product streams requires further developments in the field of white biotechnology but equally new effective separation processes. Hence traditional fields like thermodynamics have to be extended towards biological systems.

The term biorefinery understands itself as the implementation of processes dealing with natural resources. It signifies the interaction of biology, chemistry and thermodynamics in green processes for increased value products avoiding undesired waste streams.

This work is dedicated to develop new separation processes in order to handle the product streams of future refineries. Previous studies have shown, that the combination of liquid hot water with an enzymatic saccharification is a promising method to convert lignocellulose into valuable products [1,2]. However the purity of product streams is a crucial factor for an economic process. Therefore new separation processes like the micellar extraction shall be further investigated. In opposite to thermal separation processes the micellar extraction is particularly suitable for thermally unstable compounds like proteins.
Beside the long-term experiences of this institute in the field of high pressure engineering, effective methods for the determination of chemical data like partition coefficients are available. In order to minimize the experimental efforts and to predict the behaviour of related systems quantum mechanical calculations accomplish the experimental results. The application of the commercial software COSMO-RS for biological systems and thus for biorefineries will be evaluated.

• [1] Rogalinski T., Ingram T., Brunner G.: Hydrolysis of Lignocellulosic Biomass in Water under Elevated Temperatures and Pressures. Journal of Supercritical Fluids, Volume 47, Issue 1, November 2008, Pages 54-63
• [2] Ingram T., Rogalinski T., Bockemühl V., Antranikian G., Brunner G.: Semi-Continuous Liquid Hot Water Pretreatment of Rye Straw. Accepted for publication in Journal of Supercritical Fluids, Ms. Ref. No.: SUPFLU-D-08-00157R1