Main ideas and research focus for green biomass work in Biovalue

The overall vision is to develop a decentralised, robust and overall optimised pretreatment process for green biomass for production of animal protein feed and a storable fibre fraction that can be used as substrate on centralised biorefineries.

In order to achieve viable processes on leaf protein extraction from biomass, it is crucial to integrate and optimise the whole process, e.g. wet fractionation, filtration recovery input and energy costs against product yield and quality. The partnering companies KMC and Hamlet Protein have both established full-scale industrial plants for protein extraction from potatoes and soybean, respectively. KMC has made its potato protein process line available to the project for large scale green biomass test runs.

OBJECTIVES

To characterise how the composition of different types of green biomass and processing conditions such as temperature, pressure, water content and processing time affect the yield and quality of extracted protein and storable fibres

To understand how unwanted secondary plant metabolites compromising feed quality or having an adverse effect on animal production, health or product quality can been removed or deactivated