Producing Bioethanol from Miscanthus: Experience of Primary Scale-Up.

The demand for precursors obtained by biotechnological means is constantly growing in technical chemistry. The use of bioethanol is therefore of interest in the production of ethylene. In this work, Miscanthus sacchariflorus is used as a raw material for the production of bioethanol for the first time. The stage of the chemical treatment of miscanthus with 4 wt % nitric acid solution is successfully scaled-up under the conditions of pilot industrial production, and the products of nitric acid treatment (PNTs) are obtained with a yield of 37.4% and a 96.0% content of hydrolyzable components. It is shown that preliminary chemical treatment of miscanthus with nitric acid, regardless of its type, allows substrates with similar chemical compositions to be obtained. The process is scaled up for the first time in a fermenter with a capacity of 11 L (a scaling factor of 1 : 8) to combine the saccharification and fermentation of PNTs from miscanthus and raise the concentration of PNTs from 60.0 to 90.0 g/L. Commercially available enzyme preparations Cellolux-A and Bruzheim BGX are used for saccharification. Yeast strain VKPM Saccharomyces cerevisiae Y-1693 is used for fermentation. It is found that the concentration of bioethanol grows by 9.5 g/L upon raising the substrate concentration from 60.0 to 90.0 g/L. It is recommended that a substrate concentration of 90.0 g/L be used to scale up the process under trial industrial conditions. A basic scheme isproposed for producing bioethanol with a yield of bioethanol 202 L/t of miscanthus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]