Abstract
A systematic study was performed to understand interactions among biomass loading during ionic liquid (IL) pretreatment, biomass type and biomass structures. White poplar and eucalyptus samples were pretreated using 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (EmimOAc) at 110 °C for 3 h at biomass loadings of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 wt%. All of the samples were chemically characterized and tested for enzymatic hydrolysis. Physical structures including biomass crystallinity and porosity were measured by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and small angle neutron scattering (SANS), respectively. SANS detected pores of radii ranging from ∼25 to 625 Å, enabling assessment of contributions of pores with different sizes to increased porosity after pretreatment. Contrasting dependences of sugar conversion on white poplar and eucalyptus as a function of biomass loading were observed and cellulose crystalline structure was found to play an important role.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 113-118 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Bioresource Technology |
| Volume | 232 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2017 |
Funding
Gang Cheng acknowledges support for this research by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1432109) and China Scholarship Council (201606885004). We acknowledge support by the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (http://www.jbei.org) through the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U. S. Department of Energy. A portion of this research used resources at the High Flux Isotope Reactor, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Keywords
- Biomass loading
- Ionic liquid pretreatment
- Porosity
- SANS
- XRD