Biologic conversion of inexpensive and abundant sources of cellulosic bioma
ss offers a low-cost route to production of fuels and commodity chemicals t
hat can provide unparalleled environmental, economic, and strategic benefit
s. However, low-cost, high-yield technologies are needed to recover sugars
from the hemicellulose fraction of biomass and to prepare the remaining cel
lulose fraction for subsequent hydrolysis. Uncatalyzed hemicellulose hydrol
ysis in flow-through systems offers a number of important advantages for re
moval of hemicellulose sugars, and it is believed that oligomers could play
an important role in explaining why the performance of flow-through system
s differs from uncatalyzed steam explosion approaches. Thus, an effort is u
nder way to study oligomer formation kinetics, and a small batch reactor is
being applied to capture these important intermediates in a closed system
that facilitates material balance closure for varying reaction conditions.
In this article, heat transfer for batch tubes is analyzed to derive temper
ature profiles for different tube diameters and assess the impact on xylan
conversion. It was found that the tube diameter must be <0.5 in. for xylan
hydrolysis to follow the kinetics expected for a uniform temperature system
at typical operating conditions.