Newton Bhabha Industrial Waste: Valorising Waste from Sugar Cane Industries via Innovations in Pretreatment, Biotransformation and Intensification

Completed

Renewable Energy Sources(Bio-Energy, Production of transport biofuels (incl. Production from wastes))

Basic and strategic applied research

BIOLOGICAL AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES (Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Chemical Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor V V R Ranade
Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Queen's University Belfast

Research Grant

BBSRC

27 August 2018

30 March 2022

43 months

£1,012,481

£1,012,481

Northern Ireland

Professor V V R Ranade, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Queen's University Belfast

Objectives not supplied

The sugar cane industry is the second-largest agro-based industry in India and supports approximately 60 million farmers and their families. The sugarcane and associated industry however produces more than100 million tons (MT) of solid and liquid wastes every year (~80 MT of bagasse, ~10 MT of press mud, 45 billion litres of spent wash, bagasse pitch and ~25 MT of cane trash). Part of the bagasse is used to generate power by burning it in boilers. The huge quantities of wastes produced by sugar and associated industries pose a significant challenge as well as an opportunity. The vWa project is aimed at harnessing UK expertise on transforming waste biomass to energy and chemicals for providing technological solutions to address problem of waste generated by sugar and associated industries in India. Two leading bioenergy companies in UK (Nova Pangaea Technologies and Green Fuels Research) are collaborating with three UK universities (Queen's University Belfast, Cranfield University and Nottingham University) to develop appropriate solutions for transforming five major waste streams (bagasse, press mud, spent wash, bagasse pith and sugar cane trash) to transportation fuels (bio-CNG and butanol) and chemicals (succinic and lactic acid). The UK consortium has identified relevant Indian partners which include an apex R & D organisation of sugar mills, Vasantdada Sugar Institute (which has 146 sugar mills and 74 distilleries as their members), two large sugar mills (Dhampur and Lokmangal), a start-up focussed on pre-treatment (Vivira) along with three Indian research Institute (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay & Delhi and Indian Institute of Petroleum). The vWa consortium will address the key challenges in valorisation of a lignocellulosic biomass (LCB) namely development of a cost effective pre-treatment method (combination of cavitation, thermal and biological) to improve digestibility of biomass, transformation of treated biomass to fermentable sugar (after detoxification) and transformation of the sugars to products. Most of the past and ongoing efforts focus on pre-treatment for recovering cellulose from LCB and then converting it to sugars and other value added products. These approaches suffer from high costs associated to pre-treatment. In this project, we aim to develop and commercialise technologies for transforming five waste streams mentioned above to transportation fuels (bioCNG and biobutanol [BB

17/08/22