Renewable Energy Innovations: Biofuels, Solar, and Other Technologies

RENEWABLE ENERGY INNOVATIONS

This critical text, designed for microbiologists, biotechnologists, entrepreneurs, process engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, physicists, and environmentalists, assesses the current knowledge about lab-scale and large-scale production of renewable and sustainable fuels, chemicals, and materials.

Global warming is having a huge impact on the world’s ecosystem. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up early, and plant and animal ranges have relocated. On a worldwide scale, the threat posed by climate change and pollution is obvious. A green and sustainable future necessitates using renewable resources to produce fuels, chemicals, and materials. This book investigates diverse bioprocesses that are crucial to everyday life, including the key concerns regarding the generation of biofuels, energy, and food securities, along with waste management. Commercial interest in biotechnological processes has risen to produce pharmaceuticals, health supplements, foodstuffs, biofuels, and chemicals using a biocatalyst such as enzymes, microorganisms, plant cells, or animal cells in a bioreactor. The sustainability of renewable biomass, replacement of depleted fossil fuels, and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from the existing chemical and oil industries are the key benefits of switching to bioproducts.

This book discusses bioprocessing to produce biofuels, biobased chemicals, bioproducts, and biomass biorefinery processes. This involves designing novel pretreatment and fractionation technologies for lignocellulose biomass into cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin and the conversion of these streams into biofuels and biobased chemicals via biochemical and thermochemical routes. This book also covers the advancement of oleaginous microorganisms for biofuels and nutraceutical, biological wastewater treatment.

Written and edited by authors from leading biotechnology research groups from across the world, this exciting new volume covers all of these technologies, including the basic concepts and the problems and solutions involved with the practical applications in the real world. Whether for the veteran engineer or scientist, student, manager, or another technician working in the field, this volume is essential for any library.

Alok Patel, PhD, is an assistant professor in Biochemical Process Engineering, Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden, and is the principal investigator of a project funded by the Swedish Research Council. He earned his PhD in biotechnology from IIT Roorkee in 2017, and his research interest focuses on biofuels, biorefineries, and other biotechnologies.

Amit Kumar Sharma, PhD, is an assistant professor in Applied Sciences Cluster, and Centre of Alternate Energy Research at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India. He earned his PhD in microalgae-based fuels from UPES, and his research interest focuses on biofuels, biorefineries, and other biotechnologies.