Biorefinery Engineering and Bioprocessing Research Centre

Arabinoxylans

The theme of Biorefinery Integration is most well demonstrated through our extensive work on arabinoxylans as a potential co-product of bioethanol production. 

The emergence of biorefineries in recent decades has given synergistic opportunities to produce new co-products not currently available.  Arabinoxylans are an example – a new class of food ingredients and non-food products, with a range of potential applications, not currently commercially available, but made possible through integration with bioethanol production.  Our work is creating novel processing strategies to produce arabinoxylan products with defined purity and functionality, made technically and economically feasible through integration with bioethanol production and other co-products. 

Other related work is similarly looking at recover of functional polysaccharides from berry pomace, citrus waste and okra.

Fermentation

Fermentation is a key bioprocessing technology.  Here our work is focussing on the synthesis of biochemical and biofuels from sustainable raw materials. Various fermentation systems, including yeast fermentation, fungal fermentation and bacterial fermentation have been developed for the production of bioethanol, succinic acid, biopolymer and industrial enzymes.

The fermentation process development has been integrated with biomass pre-treatment and synthetic biology to promote the production of value added chemicals, efficiently, economically and sustainably.

Industrial ecology

Industrial ecology encompasses integration issues at the wider scale, focusing on how an industrial system could be restructured in order to improve its economic performance and at the same time reduce its environmental impact, by imitating the way natural ecosystems function. This can be achieved by dematerializing the processes involved, by decoupling the economic output from both resource consumption and waste generation and by closing the material loops and promoting the model of circular economy.

Our research focuses on assessing the technical and economic feasibility of industrial symbiotic schemes based on waste reuse (air emissions and solid waste streams) and is mainly applied to the reuse of biorefinery waste streams.

Cereals

A particular strength is in cereals as an important raw material for food and non-food processes and at the forefront of sustainable processing based on integrated biorefineries and bioprocesses. 

Cereals such as wheat, maize, rice, oats and barley feed the world – more than half of our food, globally, comes directly or indirectly from cereals.  Cereals are also leading the way into sustainable production of society’s chemical and energy needs via renewable resources.  This gives rise to “food versus fuels” issues which must be recognised sensitively; however, the emergence of cereal biorefineries also gives new synergistic opportunities.  For example, the arabinoxylans described above offer a new class of healthy soluble fibre food ingredients not currently available to the food industry.  

Consideration of cereal biorefineries therefore requires very broad and integrated perspectives for their effective development and deployment.