Microwave irradiation--A green and efficient way to pretreat biomass.
As a non-traditional heating way, microwave irradiation (MWI) has long been used for lignocellulose pretreatment with the advent of commercial microwave oven since the 1970s. MWI pretreatment using MWI as heating source is similar to other pretreatment methods. Although MWI pretreatment solves some problems caused by other pretreatment methods, such as low heating rate and thermal efficiency, uneven heating, it brings some new challenges such as reaction vessel selection and pretreatment process design. Over 30 years of development, researchers have achieved good pretreatment performance with MWI which has been applied gradually from laboratory scale to pilot-scale. It should be noted that MWI pretreatment is facing some problems: high cost of pretreatment, short of large-scale equipment, the non-thermal effects in pretreatment is still controversial. If MWI pretreatment reaction mechanism could be further clarified and large-scale industrialized reactor be designed, MWI pretreatment might be widely used in biorefinery.
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China.
Hongqiang
H
Li
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China.
Yongshui
Y
Qu
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China.
Yongqing
Y
Yang
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China.
Senlin
S
Chang
National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China. Electronic address: super_xujian@yahoo.com.
Jian
J
Xu
D056804:Biofuels; D018533:Biomass; D006361:Heating; D008031:Lignin / Q000737:chemistry / Q000528:radiation effects*; D008872:Microwaves
D056804:Biofuels; C036909:lignocellulose; D008031:Lignin
Biomass; High pressure microwave pretreatment; Microwave irradiation; Reactor