Related Business:
Headline Archives
Earth
animals body canola children climate change conserve diet Economics edible Energy Environment fats fitness flowers food forecasting forests fruits fuel sources gardening global warming greens health herbs housing local locally grown produce local produce Low Impact Gardening medicinal medicine metal health mind oil ozone plants pollution seed spirit Sustainability trees USDA vegetables vitamins wellness
Archives
What Everyone Should Know About Energy
- What is a cap-and-trade program and how does it work?A cap-and-trade program is designed to reduce emissions of a pollutant by placing a limit (or cap) on the total amount of emissions. The cap is implemented through a system of allowances that can be traded to minimize costs to affected sources. Cap-and-trade programs for greenhouse gas emissions would increase the costs of using fossil fuels. […]
- What is the status of the U.S. nuclear industry?There are currently 104 commercial nuclear reactors at 65 nuclear power plants in 31 States. Since 1990, the share of the Nation's total electricity supply provided by nuclear power generation has averaged about 20%, with the level of nuclear generation growing at roughly the same rate as overall electricity use. Between 1985 and 1996, 34 new reactors w […]
- How can we compare or add up our energy consumption?To compare or aggregate energy consumption across different energy sources like oil, natural gas, and electricity, we must use a common unit of measure. This is similar to calculating your food energy intake by adding up the calories in whatever you eat. […]
- What is a cap-and-trade program and how does it work?
Invasive Species
- The Secret Life of Smoke in Fostering Rebirth and Renewal of Burned Landscape (Jan 27, 2010) February 1, 2010The Secret Life of Smoke in Fostering Rebirth and Renewal... […]
- Deadly Fish Virus Now Found in all Great Lakes (Jan 27, 2010) February 1, 2010Deadly Fish Virus Now Found in all Great Lakes (Jan... […]
- The Secret Life of Smoke in Fostering Rebirth and Renewal of Burned Landscape (Jan 27, 2010) February 1, 2010
Breaking Down Walls For Biofuels
Researchers at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and ethanol producers are racing to come up with ways to make ethanol from cellulosic biomass that are cheaper and easier to produce than current methods. But they are hitting a wall. Cell walls in plants are making the production of cellulosic ethanol a challenge. So researchers are creating their own computer program to help model and break down the tiny fibers of cellulose — or fibrils — found in plant cells.
Cellulosic biomass contains sugars that are much harder to get at because the plants use these tougher plant cells as structure to hold up the plant. NREL’s Antti-Pekka Hynninen is part of a team creating their own computer program to help model and break down the cellulose fibrils found in plant cells.
“To reduce the cost of cellulosic ethanol we must understand how to break down the plant cells into the sugars needed to make ethanol,” NREL Researcher Antti-Pekka Hynninen said. “The cellulose fibrils of these plants are very long so we use computer modeling to see how we can break them apart.”
NREL researchers typically study cellulose fibrils that are 500 to 1,000 glucose units long and figure out the easiest way to bust them apart. However, these fibrils are too large to study using current computer models.
“Right now the technique is to consider each atom in each fiber, which is not practical using existing computers,” Principle Scientist Mark Nimlos said. “We need to group atoms into beads, or larger grains.”
Hynninen hopes to overcome the problem presented by such large molecules by building a simpler “coarse-grained” computer model of cellulose fibrils. In the new approach, multiple atoms (typically 3 to 7) are grouped into a single spherical bead. The coarse-grained model is then built up from these beads. The new model is expected to allow computer simulations that are 10 to 100 times faster.
Next steps for the program officially titled “Meso-Scale Computational Modeling of Polysaccharides in Plant Cell Walls” are to validate the model and publish the work done at NREL so this type of modeling can be used in other areas.
“I believe this same method could be used for other systems and they don’t have to be cellulosic or proteins — there’s a potential for many uses.” Hynninen said. — Heather Lammers