Development and integration of physical, chemical and biological processes

Focused on sustainability, LNBR has a unique structure that encompasses science from the atomic level with the rational design of microorganisms and biochemical routes, through all bench development, process design, pilot plant scaling-up, and techno-economic evaluation of biotechnological and biorenewable processes. The main characteristics of the Pilot Plant are:

  • Handling a very large range of biomass feedstocks and pretreatment processes, with different equipment’s and propose,
  • Ability to modulate and integrate multiple technologies using different types of equipment into end-to-end process integration, validation and evaluation tests,
  • High-quality process data generation supported by automated data acquisition and process control systems along with world-class chemical analysis,
  • Enhance bio-processing competence reducing risks, costs, and time when scaling-up from lab-scale.

The pilot plant contains reactors from 20 to 350L, most of them with corrosion-resistant alloys, specially designed for development of physical-chemical processes. It also has 20 to 300L fermenters, solid-liquid separation equipment, downstream and cleaning equipment, defibration and biomass grinding. The pilot plant equipment is fully controlled and automated, with data storage in a central repository.