A MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING APPROACH FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF SACCHARIFICATION AND FERMENTATION STAGES OF A BIOETHANOL PLANT

Abstract

The biorefineries concept from renewable sources has gained much attention in recent years because they improve sustainability with regard to fossil fuel refineries that are limited by the depletion of petroleum reserves. In this perspective, the production of ethanol from sugar cane bagasse is highly attractive because it reduces the fossil fuels consumption, the energy costs and the greenhouse gases emission. In this context, this paper aims to develop an optimal model design of an ethanol plant, considering bagasse pretreatment stages for subsequent simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF). SSF variant, as its name suggests, has the advantage that enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation stages are simultaneously carried out on the same equipment, obtaining directly the ethanol as a main product. The proposed approach is based on a mixed integer linear programming model which is optimized by GAMS-CPLEX package.