Biomass feeding in cellulosic ethanol projects: An underestimated issue?

Projects unsuitable for specific types of biomass can cause serious flow problems, capable of making the production unfeasible. This paper aims to identify whether there was available technological knowledge proper to design equipment that would guarantee a linear flow feed of biomass as raw material, searching patents applications, that is an efficient tool widely used to analyse technological scenarios. The results showed an increase in the patents number dealing with specific types of biomass as of 2016 – a pick of 14 patent application per year, but still in a very small number if compared to the number of patents applied on biomass in general – a pick of 5.974 patent application per year. Analysing together with problems occurred in cellulosic ethanol plants, these results seem to support the hypothesis that new technological developments will still be needed to allow plants to work efficiently with biomass as feedstock. This study brings a new approach to discussions about the challenges faced by second-generation ethanol plants, both in the search methodology developed for this research and in bringing the theme of biomass feeding and handling to the centre of debates on the next challenges for industrial pants using lignocellulosic biomass as feedstock.