ANNOUNCEMENTS
Feedstock conditioning system is a part of the second generation ethanol process. This stage is generally not given much importance compared to the other stages in the process flow as the other processes have various sub-stages on which digestibility and productivity of the bioethanol is dependant. But feedstock conditioning system can be called as a silent player which is equally important as preparing the biomass for the next stages. The biomass we refer here are the agri-residues which are available in several sizes and are required to be reduced to a common size to feed into the system and to process it further. This is where the size reduction equipment plays a vital role. Along with size reduction, another important task is to remove the extraneous matter which generally comes along with the agri-residues during harvesting and material handling. Presence of extraneous matter in the biomass can reduce the yield so proper cleaning is required. Here, the size reduction and cleaning process together can be called as the conditioning system. In this study we would be looking into the properties of various biomass, their availability, size reduction and feedstock cleaning equipment and their commercial availability. Our focus is to define a reliable and user friendly system with low downtime in the process.
