BACKGROUND Lignocellulosic biomass is an abundant and inexpensive resource for biofuel production. Alongside its biotechnological conversion, pretreatment is essential to enable efficient enzymatic hydrolysis by making cellulose susceptible to cellulases. Wet oxidation of biomass, such as acetone/water oxidation, that employs hot acetone, water, and oxygen, has been found to be an attractive pr...

HOW TO CITE: Reddy P. A critical review of ionic liquids for the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass. S Afr J Sci. 2015;111(11/12), Art. #2015-0083, 9 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/ sajs.2015/20150083 Ionic liquids have been the subject of active research over the course of the last decade and have in the past been touted as one of the most promising technologies for revolutionising the...

Water quality in a run-off canal system in an industrial area was evaluated for a range of physical and chemical properties comprising trace metals (including mercury (Hg), chromium (Cr), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), salinity, pH, turbidity, total dissolved solids, total suspended solids, chemical oxygen demand (COD), and dissolved oxygen). High concentrations of potassium (K) (1.260-2.345 mg/l) ...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Previous research on alkaline pretreatment has mainly focused on optimization of the process parameters to improve substrate digestibility. To achieve satisfactory sugar yield, extremely high chemical loading and enzyme dosages were typically used. Relatively little attention has been paid to reduction of chemical consumption and process waste management, which has prov...

three hundred twin births from a hospital in tehran, iran have been analyzed for seasonal variation at birth and physical measurements. the results show that the highest twinning rates for mm (5.61), ff (7.73) and mf (5.36) were seen in april, january and september, respectively. the four physical measurements at birth showed non-significant differences among the male and female twins, but mm a...

a experiment was lay out in order to evaluate the effects  of different biofertilizers on yield and yield components of maize at the lorestan provience, iran. the experiment was a factorial design with three replications. treatments were three nitrogen biofrtilizers (nitrokara (n1), o4 (n2), o6 (n3) and control (n4)) and three phosphate biofrtilizers (phosphate barvar2 (p1), biozarr (p2), mc1+p...

studies show that any complications including hemorrhage, lack of blood supply, lack of oxygen supply, and death of cells in a tissue, will have a clear effect on electrical properties of that tissue. thus, by measuring impedance of a set of tissues, potential problems of the damaged tissue may be found. since electrical impedance is closely related to the measuring frequency, obviously, every ...

A montmorillonite has been intercalated with Al3+ polycations, using concentrated solutions and clay mineral dispersions. The reaction has been assisted by microwave radiation, yielding new intercalated solids and leading to Al-pillared solids after their calcination at 500 °C. The solids were characterized by elemental chemical analysis, X-ray diffraction, FTIR spectroscopy, thermal analyses, ...

We present a simple smoothing operator for surfel-bounded solids obtained by adding two solids together using boolean operations. When adding two surfel-bounded solids together with the union operator, it is sometimes desirable to smooth out the sharp creases in the surface of the resulting solid. This report presents a simple local smoothing operator for this purpose. We illustrate that this o...