Technical Report

[What is bioethanol?]

Bioethanol is a renewable natural energy derived from plant resources. It is expected to be a promising future energy source since it is carbon neutral which does not increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when it is burnt.

However, there is an issue in manufacturing method used in Brazil and the United States because the bioethanol is produced from foods such as sugar cane and corn, competing against food resources.

Recently, people have tried to find various new bioethanol production processes using ingredients that do not compete against foods.
The world is looking for a new way of making bioethanol by using the material so-far regarded as useless, for examples, cellulose composing rice straw, barley straw, thinning wood, bagasse, or corn cores.

[From cellulose-based raw materials to bioethanol]

Bioethanol can be obtained by separating cellulose through pre-treatment and putting it into　saccharification fermentation. However, cellulose is much more difficult to be saccharified compared to starch. Thus, it is important to have a pretreatment process to prompt saccharification. To speed up the saccharification, the reactivity needs to be improved by fine-pulverizing cellulose materials.

[Pulverizing cellulose]

When pulverizing cellulose, it is important to select the best pulverizer suitable to the properties of the material to process. Nara Machinery is proposing various efficient pulverizing method depending on the nature of raw materials including cellulose.