The ultimate aim of a Biorefinery is to
utilize 100% of the feed material. However, this may yet be difficult
to achieve in practice and there will hence be a varying amount of
process residues. Such residues may originate from process chemicals,
inorganic compounds, or high-molar-mass natural polymers that have
undergone chemical reactions during the processing which have rendered
them unsuitable for further processing. The sampling, pretreatment,
characterization, and fate of these process residues will be
challenging but necessary to achieve the ultimate goal of total
utilisation of the feed material. The utilisation of such residues for
bioenergy (i.e. burning the residues) places high demands on a thorough
characterization and deep understanding of the material to be able to
avoid problems of corrosion, fouling, and low performance.
