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Introduction
Biofuels
Food engineering
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September 2005 - June 2007
June 2007 - July 2016
Publications
Publications (113)
Biomass is perhaps the only renewable resource on the planet capable of delivering molecules similar to those derived from petroleum, and one of the most developed technologies to achieve this is gasification. When it comes to biomass conversion into fuels and commodities, supercritical water gasification (SCWG) could offer promising solution for p...
Alternative options have been studied to mitigate the negative impact of fossil fuel sources, mainly especially when it comes to alternative energy sources. In this work, cannabis residues have been considered as a potential biomass residues for energy recovery due to their energy content, and the increase in the cannabis market in Canada has creat...
The repurposing of industrial solid wastes for sustainable energy production figures as a convenient alternative to decrease the carbon footprint of industrial processes by increasing circularity and reducing the utilization of fossil-based energy vectors. The furniture industry generates significant amounts of carbon-based waste materials, includi...
Syngas, mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide, has traditionally been produced from coal and natural gas, with biomass gasification later emerging as a renewable process. It is widely used in fuel synthesis through the Fischer–Tropsch (FT) process, where the H2/CO ratio is crucial in determining product efficiency and quality. In this sense, this stu...
The purpose of this study is to understand the operating conditions of a physicochemical pretreatment process for lignocellulosic biomass using homogeneous acid catalysts. Four parameters were studied: moisture content, acid catalyst, type of biomass and reactor morphology. The different types of biomass (perennial grasses: sugarcane bagasse, corn...
Although bioethanol production is already well-established in several countries, there are stages of the production process that could still be optimized. Feedstock storage is often one of the least efficient part of the bioethanol production process because no sugar preservation techniques are used, which more than often results in sugar waste to...
By-products from different industries could represent an available source of carbon and nitrogen which could be used for bioethanol production using conventional Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. Spent cherry brine and whey are acid food by-products which have a high organic matter content and toxic compounds, and their discharges represent significa...
Just like for the food supply chain, sugar-based feedstock used in the bioethanol industry might be affected by biological contamination, resulting in important economic losses. Therefore, it is necessary to develop cost-effective storage techniques capable of preserving feedstock over several months. In this study, three different techniques (ozon...
Lignin pellets were produced using a single pellet system as well as a laboratory-scale pellet mill. The feedstock used in this work was lignin isolated from poplar wood (Populus tremuloides) using a direct saccharification process. An investigation was performed on the influence of the initial moisture content on the dimensions, impact and water r...
Biofuels production from microalgal biomass has been investigated as an alternative approach to replace conventional fossil fuels, contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. However, several constraints such as high cultivation and harvesting costs are still limiting the techno-economic viability of microalgae-based biofuels. The in...
For many biorefinery processes, the development of effective preservation techniques is essential to avoid any sugar loss between crop-harvesting and fermentation. In this work, five physicochemical techniques (acidification, ozonation, addition of sodium hydrosulfite, sodium sulfate and oil layer) were investigated for the preservation of sugar be...
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the validity of an alternative route to valorize declassified maple syrups affected by flavor defects such as ropy maple syrup (RMS) and buddy maple syrup (BMS) as feedstocks for ethanol production. An acid hydrolysis treatment (0.1 M, 0.5 M, 5 M, and 10 M) was performed on the RMS to break the polysaccha...
Microalgal cultivation represents a promising technique for the photosynthetic fixation of CO2 present in gas streams while offering the possibility to produce valuable microalgae-based bioproducts and biofuels. CO2 can be captured using an alkaline solution and subsequently used as an inorganic carbon (IC) source for microalgal cultivation. First,...
Biodiesel is a biodegradable and renewable fuel, that generally consists of fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) produced by transesterification of lipids using methanol and a catalyst. Calcium oxide (CaO) is a heterogeneous catalyst that has been extensively studied to produce biodiesel due to its high catalytic activity. In addition, and in order to av...
Among the various agro-industrial by-products, sugar beet molasses produced by sugar refineries appear as a potential feedstock for ethanol production through yeast fermentation. A response surface methodology (RSM) was developed to better understand the effect of three process parameters (concentration of nutrient, yeast and initial sugar) on the...
Liquid effluents generated during the gasification process of municipal solid wastes (MSW) represent highly heterogenous and recalcitrant substrates, and thus require energy-intensive treatments prior to their discharge into the environment. However, these streams represent untapped carbon sources which can be converted, under the right conditions,...
An alkali-mediated hydrothermal approach was optimized for partial extraction of high-purity hemicellulose (xylan) from a timber waste product (unbleached eucalyptus sawdust). The extraction process was: a) extractives removal using sequential solvent extraction; b) alkali-mediated hydrothermal extraction of hemicellulose; and c) purification of th...
The two-step concentrated acid hydrolysis approach is a very efficient method for the generation of monomeric sugars from lignocellulosic biomass, due to its ability to generate near-theoretical sugar yields, at moderate processing times. Sulfuric acid is the most frequently employed acid due to its combination of low cost, high efficiency, and low...
Participation au 11e édition du symposium étudiant de génie chimique et de génie biotechnologique
Levulinates are used as oxygenated fuel additives or as blending components in biodiesel. A metal salt was used for the direct conversion of real biomass, ie. softwood bark, to produce methyl levulinate (ML) and levulinic acid (LA). The experimental data were analyzed through response surface methodology (RSM), using a central composite design (CCD...
Proceedings of the World Sustainable Energy Days 2020
Following the COP21 conference in Paris, most of the world’s industrialized countries, as well as emerging markets, pledged to reduce or stabilize their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in light of increasing concerns regarding climate change [1]. The necessity to decrease GHG emissions will have implications on the consumption patterns of different...
In this work, the direct production of levulinates from cheap residual lignocellulosic biomass was performed using an affordable homogeneous catalyst. A central composite design (CCD) using the response surface methodology (RSM) was applied to analyze the effects of the four selected factors (acid concentration, temperature, α-cellulose content, an...
This chapter deals with condensable/liquid compounds produced during biomass and waste thermal degradation processes. These compounds include a huge number of species, mainly organic, but also inorganic. These species may vary according to biomass or waste type, and even more according to process operating conditions, namely temperature, heating ra...
This book provides authoritative information, techniques and data necessary for the appropriate understanding of biomass and biowaste (understood as contaminated biomass) composition and behaviour while processed in various conditions and technologies. Numerous techniques for characterizing biomass, biowaste and by-product streams exist in literatu...
Transitioning from the current linear economy to a circular, sustainable model requires a redesign of the status quo through new policies such as carbon pricing as well as inclusion of resource depletion, waste management and environmental pollution costs. Biofuels and biocommodities should unavoidably play a major role in shaping the new global en...
Cellulosic ethanol could play a major role in the upcoming circular-economy once the process complexity, low carbohydrate extraction yields and high costs are resolved. To this purpose, different steam-treatment severity factors were employed on whole sweet sorghum biomass, followed by the delignification and hydrolysis of resulted lignocellulose f...
Recent years marked an increased focus towards the valorization of biorefinery side-streams for the production of various high added-value molecules and platform chemicals. The present study tackles the opportunity of using liquid ethanol fermentation effluents of bark hydrolysates for microalgal conversion to various marketable molecules. Initiall...
Black liquor obtained from semichemical pulping of barley straw was depolymerized in a stirred autoclave reactor, at temperature in the range of 250–300 °C while varying the amount of catalyst (zeolite Y). Three fractions were obtained from the depolymerized liquor: a fraction directly extracted from the liquid with isopropyl acetate (Lα), a second...
Canada has been relying on the integration of its forest industry for decades during which lumbering was closely associated with the pulp and paper industry back in an age where CO2 emissions were merely discussed. Nowadays, the country is facing many challenges, one of which being the progressive disappearance of the pulp and paper industry, which...
Environmental issues related to greenhouse gas emissions are progressively pushing the transition toward fossil-free energy scenario, in which renewable energies such as solar and wind power will unavoidably play a key role. However, for this transition to succeed, significant issues related to renewable energy storage have to be addressed. Power-t...
Full feedstock potential needs to be tapped to make lignocellulosic ethanol an economically viable reality. This work focuses on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae ethanol fermentation of fresh sorghum carbohydrates extracted through a mild steam-treatment process, and the subsequent Chlorella vulgaris cultivation using the generated liquid and gaseous f...
Maximizing the extracted carbohydrates from lignocellulosic biomass represents one critical step towards a wide implementation of industrial-scale second-generation ethanol production. To this purpose, a novel steam-based treatment strategy targeting the whole sweet sorghum biomass was developed. This extraction was followed by a non-enzymatic hydr...
This presentation showcases our saccharification process and a greater strategy for lignocellulosic ethanol commercialization.
The present work aimed at optimising the design and operation of char utilization as a low cost catalyst for tars reforming. The effect of temperature, tars composition, light hydrocarbons composition, steam content and type of reformer on the conversion of tars and light hydrocarbons into additional syngas using sorted municipal solid waste (MSW)—...
Recent years marked the revitalization of microalgal phytoremediation efforts due to the promise of converting organic-rich effluents into various biofuels and biocommodities, including potential CO2 uptake. In this work, the phytoremediation potential and subsequent production of Chlorella vulgaris biomass containing high added-value metabolites w...
In this work, CFD simulations of a slurry bubble columns were performed and validated with experimental data. The superficial gas velocities investigated in the experiments were 5 cm/s and 8 cm/s for a solid loading varying from 7% to 14% in a 0.14 m to 0.26 m internal diameter column. A population balance model (PBM) was implemented and solved num...
Using lignocellulosic residues for bioethanol production could provide an alternative solution to current approaches at competitive costs once challenges related to substrate recalcitrance, process complexity and limited knowledge are overcome. Thus, the impact of different process variables on the ethanol production by Saccharomyces cerevisiae usi...
The methanol-to-olefin (MTO) reaction was investigated in a bench-scale, fixed-bed reactor using an extruded catalyst composed of a commercial SAPO-34 (65 weight percentage, wt-%) embedded in an amorphous SiO2 matrix (35 wt-%). The texture properties, acidity and crystal structure of the pure SAPO-34 and its extruded form (E-SAPO-34) were analyzed...
Cellulose hydrolysis processes using concentrated acid usually involve two steps in order to obtain high glucose yields. The first step (pre-treatment) decrystallizes cellulose while the second step (post-hydrolysis) converts the amorphous cellulose to glucose. The two-step process developed by the Industrial Research Chair on Cellulosic Ethanol an...
The catalytic activity of char (fixed carbon + metal oxides) recovered from a commercial waste gasification plant and char-derived ash (metal oxides only) from the oxidation of the char (i.e. the controlled oxidation of the amorphous carbon in the char) was investigated for the cracking and steam reforming of tar. The latter was obtained following...
Sweet sorghum was subjected to an impregnation step, which recovered most of the 1st generation sugars, prior to a steam-treatment extraction of the 2nd generation sugars, at three different severity factors (SF). A medium severity (3.56 SF) proved to be an optimal compromise between the amount of sugars extracted and the fermentation inhibitors ge...
With the increasing world's energy demand along with the constantly expanding field of natural gas exploitation around the world, dry reforming of methane has gained increasing attention. Through this technology, natural gas can be converted into syngas, which is a well-known building block used for the production of alcohols and fuels. This techno...
The purpose of this work is to determine the best conditions allowing the optimal recovery of the first and second generation sugars found in sweet sorghum. This optimization was performed using the severity factor, combined with response surface methodology (RSM) and based on a two-variable central composite design. Dry sorghum was first impregnat...
A hybrid Euleran-Lagrangian Dense Discrete Particle Model (DDPM) was used to numerically simulate the bubbling behavior of a fluidized bed reactor. The model exploits the parcels concept to reduce the number of particles to simulate while exploiting the Kinetic Theory of Granular Flow (KTGF) to account for their repulsive interactions. The DDPM-KTG...
The aim of this study is to utilize low- or even negative- value industrial waste products generated by a 1st generation ethanol plant to both produce Chlorella vulgaris microalgal biomass as well as to evaluate the phytoremediation potential of this approach.
In this work, CFD simulations of an air-water bubbling column were performed and validated with experimental data. The superficial gas velocities used for the experiments were 0.019 and 0.038 m/s and were considered as an homogeneous regime. The former involves simpler physics when compared to a heterogeneous regime where the superficial velocities...
This paper reports the conclusions of the three panel discussions held during the WasteEng2016 Conference in Albi, France (http://www.wasteeng2016.org/). It explores the research and development trends aiming at the production of energy and added value materials from waste and/or biomass. Three approaches are investigated: thermochemical conversion...
Ethanol production using waste biomass represents a very attractive approach. However, there are considerable challenges preventing a wide distribution of these novel technologies. Thus, a fractional-factorial screening of process variables and Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast inoculum conditions was performed using a synthetic fermentation media. Su...
Based upon the two fluid model (TFM) theory, a CFD model was implemented to investigate a cold multiphase-fluidized bubbling bed reactor. The key variable used to characterize the fluid dynamic of the experimental system, and compare it to model predictions, was the time-pressure drop induced by the bubble motion across the bed. This time signal wa...
In high temperature gasification reactors, inert ashes coming with the feedstock deposit on the walls in the form of slag. In these kind of reactors, external cooling screens are used to control slag deposition. A transient 2D model was developed and implemented to simulate the growth of a slag liquid-solid layer at the walls of an entrained flow c...
Conversion of carbon contained in the solid residues (tars + biochar) derived from urban biomass gasification named herein TC would allow enhancing the yield of carbon species (CO/CO2) in synthetic gas. For this purpose, three low cost materials have been tested as possible catalysts: iron species (reduced Fe), bone meal (BM), and ashes (ash) recov...
Fine hemp fibers (cottonized hemp) were processed using steam explosion. The quantification of the defibration rate was performed by image processing. Based on this method, the hemp defibration was optimized using a response surface methodology based on three-variable central composite design for the production of elementary fibers with low variabi...
In this work, the liquid phase hydrogenation of furfural has been studied using a biochar-supported platinum catalyst in a batch reactor. Reactions were performed between 170 °C and 320 °C, using 3 wt % and 5 wt % of Pt supported on a maple-based biochar under hydrogen pressure varying from 500 psi to 1500 psi for reaction times between 1 h and 6 h...
Cellulose fibres were extracted from recycled Tetra Pak food packaging which can be a source of low cost biomass using a simple process. According to the FT-IR and XRD results, alkaline purification and bleaching have removed 99 % of the lignin that remained in the recycled cellulose fibres (up to 10 %). TEM analysis showed that depending on cellul...
The recycling of multilayer packaging is hindered by the problematic separation of the packaging components. Among the numerous multilayer packaging, the ubiquitous 5-layer polyethylene/cardboard/polyethylene/aluminum/polyethylene one is one of the most difficult to recycle. This work examines how the synthetic polymer, cellulose and aluminum compo...
Conversion of methanol and dimethyl ether to propylene was investigated in a fixed-bed reactor using an extruded H-ZSM-5 catalyst embedded in a matrix of silica. Physical and chemical properties of these catalysts have been determined by SEM, N2 adsorption–desorption, XRD, and NH3-TPD. Results showed that the amount of mesopores tends to vary with...
To improve the certainty that a specific small organic molecule has been detected in a given sample by high-resolution mass spectrometry, other techniques that give conclusive evidence about the chemical structure of a compound like nuclear magnetic resonance or complementary information on its composition such as hydrogen–deuterium exchange (HDX)...
Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) was modified by grafting onto its surface ferulic acid, methacryloyl chloride and oleoyl chloride. The efficacy of the chemical modification was confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. In addition, the size distribution of the cellulosic particles was investigated by optical microscopy and laser granulometry...
OVERVIEW • In post-column hydrogen-deuterium exchange (HDX) , D 2 O is added with a tee connector. D 2 O consumption is thus greatly reduced. Deuteration percentage (DP) is <100%, a correction is necessary for good spectral interpretation. Satisfactory DP was obtained in chromatographic conditions with a HILIC column. HDX was performed on a solutio...
In this work, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was used as a process analytical tool (PAT), allowing for quantification of the output gas from a dry reforming of methane (DRM) reaction. This PAT was correlated with gas chromatography (GC) analysis, where nitrogen was used as an internal standard. Because nitrogen does not react under...