title: [Preface for special issue on biomass refinery (2014)].
abstract: Biomass is the most abundant organic macromolecules in nature, which is expected to achieve the brilliant of biorefinery equivalent to petroleum refining. However, it is considered as the future industry to human due to the complicated composition and transformation processes. The traditional lignocellulose bio-refining thoughts ignored the functional requirements of products, but spent a lot of energies to destruct macromolecule into small molecules, and then converted the small molecules into different products, which was high energy consumption and low atom economy. How to realize the biorefinery of lignocellulose is the key point and difficulty to achieve the biomass industry. An ideal biorefinery of lignocellulose should as far as possibly to obtain the maximum yield of each component, to maintain the integrity of the molecule, to optimize the utilization of raw materials and finally to realize the maximum value. Therefore, it requires the raw materials refining of lignocellosic biomass should be based on the relationship of structure, process transformation and related product characteristics. This special issue reports the latest advances in the fields of raw material refinery, refining technologies, conversion technologies of component.
authors.forename: Hongzhang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Weihua
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Qiu
mesh_terms: D018533:Biomass; D001711:Biotransformation; D008031:Lignin / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: C036909:lignocellulose; D008031:Lignin