CTBE - Pilot Plant for Process Development

 

 CTBE is a Brazilian National Laboratory, whose Mission is:

To contribute to maintain Brazilian leadership in the sustainable production of bioethanol from sugarcane, through state-of-the-art research, development, and innovation.

 

CTBE is operated by the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Technology Association (ABTLuS), a private not-for-profit organization, which already operates the Brazilian National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS). The facilities of CTBE are being built on the campus of LNLS, in Campinas, São Paulo. When completed, these facilities will house up to 80 permanent researchers, a similar number of visitors (graduate students, PhD students, post-doctoral fellow, and associated researchers), and technical workers, working towards the goals of the Center. Its first building, housing laboratories and administration, will be completed in September 2009. 

 

CTBE will operate:

• as a research institute, by performing competitive RD&I for improving feedstock and conversion routes for sugar cane bioethanol production;
• as a partner of other research organizations working in the same areas, through a network of associated laboratories in universities and research institutes;
• in touch with industrial problems and solutions, by implementing and demonstrating new technologies that can be incorporated to present and future Brazilian plants for bioethanol production.

 

Pilot Plant for Process Development (PPDP) 

CTBE will present the project for its Pilot Plant for Process Development (PPDP) to the research community during the Workshop on Hydrolysis Route for Cellulosic Ethanol from Sugarcane. One of the aims of the presentation is to discuss with Workshop participants possible ways to open the facility to users, as well as to identify more precisely needs of potential users, and, if possible, make the relevant adaptations to the project.

The PPDP will provide facilities to explore in systematic ways, on a semi-industrial scale, processes and operations to convert biomass into fermentable sugars, and these into bioethanol. The joint Development Laboratories will provide the infrastructure to conduct small scale experiments, as well as the necessary analytical tools to support the PPDP operations.

As part of a National Laboratory, the facilities of CTBE will be open to external users, both industrial and academic. Industrial users will be able to test new processes and gather information needed for their scale-up, whereas academic users will have the opportunity to scale-up their laboratory processes, as well as having access to standardized and well-characterized feedstocks, micro-organisms, and enzymes. Both PPDP and the Development Laboratories will have facilities devoted to specific procedures such as: bagasse physical conditioning; physico-chemical pretreatment of bagasse; growth of microorganisms and enzymes production; enzymatic conversion of cellulose; recovering and purifying crude enzyme and hydrolysis liquor; and bioprocessing of hydrolysis liquors to ethanol.