<br/>For more than 20 years, the laboratory of Agro-Industrial Chemistry develops an ambitious and multi-scale research topic on the use of twin-screw extrusion for the processing of biomass for non-food applications. This talk will give an overview of past and present projects, discussing specific operating conditions and their consequences on biopolymer native organization.<br/>For the production of agro-materials, compounding processes have been designed and in some cases industrialized integrating specific targeted actions such as the plasticization of primary cell-walls (sugar beet, tobacco), the “fusion” of storage polymers (starch, oilseed proteins) and/or the destructuring of secondary cell-walls (lignocellulosic fibers). In those cases, low moisture conditions, high shear screw elements and compression zones (in which water reaches the subcritical state) are necessary. For the pretreatment of lignocellulosic fibers, the conjugated use of chemicals is also discussed.<br/>In integrated biorefining processes, twin-screw extrusion may also be used simultaneously as a continuous liquid-solid extractor for oil, polysaccharides or proteins and as a pre-treatment of the fibrous raffinate. This is especially efficient for the processing of oilseed crops and the production of binderless fiberboards or to prepare technical fibers for composite applications.<br/>Finally, in the bioenergy field, a specific pretreatment process for the production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic feedstock has been developed and is actually in the up-scaling phase. Integrating the use of enzymes during the extrusion, this process enlightens the good mixing capacity of twin-screw extrusion.

Twin-screw extrusion: A versatile tool for the pretreatment of biomass

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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