Sustainability assessment of sugarcane residues valorization to biobutadiene by exergy and exergoeconomic evaluation

Alireza Fallahi, Somayeh Farzad, Seyed Saeid Mohtasebi, Mohsen Mandegari, Johann F. Görgens, Vijai Kumar Gupta, Su Shiung Lam, Meisam Tabatabaei and Mortaza Aghbashlo

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2021, vol. 147, issue C

Abstract: Butadiene is one of the essential platform chemicals for producing a broad spectrum of synthetic rubbers, polymers, copolymers, and latexes. Among the various routes developed to make bio-based butadiene, dehydrogenation/dehydration of bioethanol has exhibited great promise regarding economic viability and ecological soundness. In this study, a process producing bioethanol from sugarcane residues and then converting the synthesized bioethanol to biobutadiene was simulated and analyzed. The process included biomass pretreatment, enzyme production, saccharification/fermentation, bioethanol separation/distillation, ethanol dehydrogenation, acetaldehyde liquefaction/compression, biobutadiene synthesis, biobutadiene liquefaction/compression, and biobutadiene recovery/purification subsystems. Exergy analysis was first used to identify the causes and sources of thermodynamic losses of the process. In continuation, exergoeconomic analysis was performed based on the obtained exergetic results to reveal the hotspots of the cost losses of the process. The highest exergy destruction rate was recorded for the bioethanol separation/distillation subsystem, amounting to 34.9%‏ ‏of the total exergy destruction rate of the process.‏ The exergy efficiency of the process was 17.5% by considering only biobutadiene as the main product of the process, while this value was increased to 87.5% by considering all useful or potentially useful outputs. The saccharification/fermentation subsystem showed the highest total hourly exergoeconomic cost (504 USD/h), corresponding to 23.1% of the total hourly exergoeconomic cost of the process. The unit costs of exergy for the biobutadiene (main product) and stillage (main by-product) streams were 6.2 and 4.2 USD/GJ, respectively. Overall, efforts to improve the process exergoeconomically should be mainly directed towards reducing the investment cost of the biomass pretreatment subsystem while diminishing the exergy destruction cost of the saccharification/fermentation subsystem.

Keywords: Biobutadiene; Bioethanol; Exergy analysis; Exergoeconomic analysis; Sugarcane residues; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121005025
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:147:y:2021:i:c:s1364032121005025

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.111214

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().