Aphios Corporation
3-E Gill Street
New Boston Park, Woburn
Massachusetts, 01801
United States
PH: +1 (781) 9326933
Fax: +1 (781) 9326865
Email: mail@aphios.com
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Company Background
Biomass resources are currently greatly underutilized in the United States
and countries around the world. If effectively exploited, these resources can
reduce our dependency on foreign oil while alleviating several environmental
problems.
Forests are prime candidates for improvement in biomass utilization. In the
harvesting of a tree, approximately 40% of the biomass is either burned or treated
as a waste problem. This waste biomass can be utilized as the feedstock for
fermentation processes that could produce ethanol, industrial chemicals and
ruminants for animal feed. Ethanol production from plant substrates requires
the development of an efficient pretreatment process for increasing the susceptibility
of woody biomass to hydrolytic enzymes. Pretreated biomass substrates can then
be hydrolyzed to glucose and converted to ethanol by conventional yeast fermentation.
Biomass produced ethanol can displace gasoline usage, thereby reducing oil consumption
while lowering air pollution.
Aphios has developed an improved biomass pretreatment process [the CFC process]
that has the combined capability to defibrate biomass at low operating temperatures
and fractionate wood into its constituents. We have demonstrated that the CFC
process is technically feasible with several advantages over conventional steam
explosion pretreatment. These conclusions are based on: (1) high enzymatic conversion
efficiencies to ethanol (CFC was 60% more effective than steam explosion in
pretreating white pine, 300% better in pretreating newsprint and just as effective
in pretreating red oak): (2) biomass recovery yields were much higher with CFC
(between 95% and 99%) than steam explosion (often less than 80%); (3) operating
conditions of temperature and time were lower for CFC than for steam explosion.