Delignification of Palm Oil Fibers

I don't remember anything specific to lignin, but I know that to degrade celulosic materials they used to use steam to "crack" the cells.

But try looking up cellulosic ethanol?methanol production, as I am pretty sure the fiber you want is a by-product of their process - and their methods have been improved to get away from energy intensive processes.

fungal method to degrade lignin in palm fiber

Only yields composting info: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-

It may be possible, but would probably be too slow for an industrial process. which would require faster through put [shorter dwell time]. Climate controlled Storage space would increase the production cost.

Thank you for the reply!

Just wondering,as you said its possible for fungal delignification,any ideas on the method to do it?

Is it feasible to add 20g of fiber into Vogel medium then incubate it at 30 celcius for 20 days at neutral pH.Then centrifuge to get the supernantant and then conduct the MnP tet to detect the lignification amount.And ideas of how to set up the Vogel medium of 4ml vogel salt(50x),2ml of trace elements(how many amounts of each elements), and 4g of dextrose as glucose dissolved in 180ml and made into 200ml.

Hi,

if you look to cellulose-extraction from wood: grinding, heating with sulfite solution will make soluble the binder (the lignin) and free the fibers.

I assume that your process will be possible by the same procedure.

RHABE

We use a cocktail of natural microbes to penetrate the fibers and release the enzymes to break cellulose down to glucose for fermentation. The technology is available for use under license from www.ire-incorp.com. The ethanol produced can be used to react with the palm oil to make biodiesel, and the lignin residue burned to generate electricty and process heat.

It depends on whether you want to remove the lignin and leave the fibre for some other use (paper, board reinforcing - probably good in fibre cement, etc), or whether you want to digest the lot and use it for fuel alcohol.

The IRE process seems to digest everything.

Bacteria have advantages over chemicals. Once you have your bacteria, there is negligible ongoing chemical cost (possibly only for pH correction).

There is often less of an effluent problem with bacteria, although that isn't always the case. Some effluents from bacterial processes can be pretty awkward.

Chemically, lignin reacts well with strong alkalis, whereas cellulose doesn't. This is the basis for the alkali process used to make paper. The NaOH/lignin waste produced is then regenerated and re used.

Modern plants can be quite clean and can be made to produce minimal pollution.

Mechanical shredding can also produce an acceptable fiber depending on the quality of fiber needed.

If you want to digest the lot, the bacterial way could be a good one except it will probably be slow compared to chemicals, requiring a larger and therefore more expensive plant.

Apparently HCl does a good job of breaking up the lignin and cellulose structure to enable yeasts to ferment it to alcohol. Neutralizing the acid, regenerating it for re use and pollution reduction are inevitably significant problems with this route, but don't seem to be insoluble.

The IRE process seems to have found suitable bacteria to do the job without the hassles of chemicals, although as far as I can tell it has yet to be scaled up even to pilot plant, let alone production size. It does seem to have great potential though and could allow the use of otherwise waste material in oil palm plantations.

Good luck with the project.

IF one did have or found a good, low cost, fast, environmentally friendly process to break up lignin, it would be akin to discovering antibiotics. Lignin is what makesplant stalks and lumber strong and it IS NOT easy to destroy it. I suspect hundreds if not thousands of researchers are hunting for, trying to develop that magic potion.

We all need to realize that planting and then harvesting plant matter to use as fuel is very inefficient use of solar energy.

"We all need to realize that planting and then harvesting plant matter to use as fuel is very inefficient use of solar energy."

And in the case of palm oil plantations in Malasia, insane expansion is destroying their natural forests as well, much of it illegally.

A process to control this devastation should be a higher priority of environmental concern.

And yeah, I know, we have our Athabasca tar sands. I find it repulsive as well.

Thanks for all the comments.Well,we could actually use fungi to degrade lignin but somehow we always need to use trial and error method of testing the fungi with proper growth media.