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Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to various renewable fuels, chemicals, materials, and electricity has attracted more and more interest in recent decades to decrease the dependence on fossil resources and reduce net CO2 emissions. Herein, we have developed an integrated process of biomass pretreatment for enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose coupled with electricity generation with polyoxometalates (POMs) and ferric ion as electron mediators and proton carriers. The pretreatment is a “charging” process, and the re-oxidation of the POMs is effectively a “discharging” process. The pretreate...

Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to electricity using fuel cell technologies is a promising but challenging research topic for sustainable electricity production. This is because that lignocellulosic biomass generally cannot be directly used as a fuel for electricity generation in a conventional fuel cell with high efficiency. Typical fuel cells that can convert lignocellulosic biomass to electricity under mild conditions ( < 100 °C) include microbial fuel cells (MFC) and novel direct biomass fuel cells (DBFC) such as that mediated by polyoxometalates (POMs) developed recently....

This chapter will discuss the impact of trace metals in kraft cooking and brownstock washing Although numerous trace metals are present, calcium tends to be the main concern because it is present at higher concentration and is the source of most scale problems encountered in mills. Calcium Will also be the principal focus of this chapter. Other trace metals create management concerns in mills, but generally not within the brownstock washing system and cannot be effectively addressed Within that system.

The development of new and improved wood adhesives is hindered by an incomplete mechanistic understanding of what makes a wood-adhesive bond able to withstand changes in moisture levels. Although common methods are used to test and report the bulk level properties of bondlines, such as bondline shear strength and wood failure analysis, sufficient experimental tools to study wood-adhesive bondlines and the effects of moisture at the nm- to mm-length scales are lacking. Here we review recently developed tools that, when combined, are capable of studying bondlines and the effects of moisture...

Furfural and levulinic acid (LA) are potential major renewable platform chemicals for producing biochemicals and biofuels. In this study, integrated conversion of corncob to furfural and LA was carried out in a one-pot system using p-toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) and step temperature profiling. A batch reaction incorporating distillation (BRD) resulted in a good furfural production yield of 61.6% based on the corncob xylan content for the hydrolysis conditions tested. Distillation not only reduced furfural loss due to side reactions to humins, but also resulted in a fairly pure and...

We report on the results of a multi-disciplinary project (including wood identification, radiocarbon dating and strontium isotope analysis) focused on a collection of pre-Columbian wooden carvings and human remains from Pitch Lake, Trinidad. While the lake's unusual conditions are conducive to the survival of organic artefacts, they also present particular challenges for analysis. There is a loss of any contextual association beyond that of the lake, and specific methodologies are required to deal with pitch contamination. A surprising taxonomic range of woods was employed for the various...

This paper evaluates the effects of acetylation level and experimental method on the observed fber saturation point (FSP) of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda)woodmeasuredusing differential scanning calorimetry. To achieve this goal, 1-mm-thick latewood samples were tested overawiderange of equilibrium moisture content(EMC). In this work, the FSP was defined as the non-freezable portion of water of the samples.Two experimental methods were used: the extrapolation of the melting enthalpy to zero and the direct calculation of the non-freezable water amount. For both methods, the FSP decreased with...

Since the mid-19th century, rare prehistoric wooden carvings and human skeletal remains have been dredged from Pitch Lake, Trinidad, during commercial asphalt mining. Establishing a chronology for these objects is challenging, due to both a lack of stratigraphic and contextual information and the necessity to completely remove any pitch to ensure accurate radiocarbon (14C) dates. A range of solvent extraction protocols was tested to identify the most suitable one for pretreating the Pitch Lake artifacts, and then applied to ten wooden objects and a human cranium recovered from the lake....

The production of renewable chemicals and biofuels must be cost- and performance- competitive with petroleumderived equivalents to be widely accepted by markets and society. We propose a biomass conversion strategy that maximizes the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass (up to 80% of the biomass to useful products) into high-value products that can be commercialized, providing the opportunity for successful translation to an economically viable commercial process. Our fractionation method preserves the value of all three primary components: (i) cellulose, which is converted into dissolving...

To keep environmental product declarations current, the underlying life-cycle inventory (LCI) data and subsequent life-cycle assessment data for structural wood products must be updated. Primary data collected from the industry for the year 2012 were analyzed using the weighted-average to update LCIs for laminated veneer lumber (LVL) production on a 1-m3 basis in the Southeast (SE) and Pacific Northwest (PNW) regions of the United States. In addition, cradle-to-gate life-cycle impact assessments (LCIAs) were performed to assess the environmental impacts associated with LVL production for...