Biofuels From Lignocellulosic Biomass - Science topic

Adarsh Shetty

There are several applications for lignin, based on your preferences and research. I'll give you a rundown of a handful of them

Lignin nanoparticles or lignin based metal/ metal-oxide nanoparticles:

other value added products from lignin:

Dear Balajii,

Thank you

Simulating biomass combustion on Aspen Plus is a relatively simple process. The first step is to create a model of the gasification process using Aspen Plus, which will allow you to predict the chemical composition of product gas for different types of biomass. Once the model has been created, you can then use it to simulate the combustion process and determine the electrical efficiency of your system. Additionally, you can also use Aspen Plus to simulate other biomass conversation processes such as solid separation and drying of fresh biomass to be converted into pellets.

Overall, Aspen Plus provides an effective way to simulate biomass combustion and other related processes in order to maximize efficiency and optimize performance.

Sources

Although Biofuels are safe things as fuel, replacement of them as energy is not affordable. For instance, when we want to produce biofuel from waste materials like waste foods, we should spend lots of fossil fuel for the degradation of them into other materials which could be used as biofuel. Indeed, not only do we spend a lot of time on degradation, but we also use a lot of other energy for the transformation of waste material.

Treatment of Lignocellulosic stock for bioethanol production requires removal of lignin barrier from Cellulose. Lignin has glassy transition temperature about 170 degrees centigrade.(Please get it reconfirmed as I have been out of touch with the subject for very long time). Heating biomass to the desired temperature and heating time are important parameters for pre-treatment of biomass.

Lalit R Kumar and Sandile Fakudze Thank you for the insightful responses

Cheers!

The amount of buffer is a process choice. If you choose 10% solids in your process, you will end up with a more dilute hydrolyzate. If you choose higher solid loads you will have a more concentrated hydrolyzate. Choice alternatives influence other steps such as separation.

That said, when determining your process you will need to know the moisture content of your biomass to calculate solids content always on a dry basis and the the enzyme load you want and finally the buffer mass/volume.

You can have a glimpse at these papers.

From a more generalized viewpoint, the promising kinds of feedstock for renewable fuels should:

Hi

Please check the following work. It describes the process in details. I believe it will help you.

https://news.energysage.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-renewable-energy/

Regards

Pankaj Kumar Yes. your topic is interesting and you can submit. The APC is 1200 USD in 2019 and will be 1400 USD in 2020.

Dear Alhassan,

It actually depends on the properties of bio oil you have extracted irrespective of its feedstock. For Kerosene stove applications, oils must have reduced viscosity but improvised thermal properties. So you can try anyone of the following methods which help you reducing the viscosity to greater extent but thermal properties to marginal extent:

(i) try distillating the bio-oil and capture the volatile vapours, condense it.

(ii) try using ultrasonic assisted or microwave assisted breaking

(iii) else as suggested try chocoholic blends

Hope this helps you.All the very best Sir

Regards,

Goku

You might find the following paper to be of some help.

Dear Cansu,

The answer to this question may not be known in the public domain (yet), and better be cautious in case you find it (multiple verification is advised!). Truth: we don't even know which type of biomass is the most used so far at industrial scale (2018), and thus other technicalities are a bit far from being "publicly" known.

The scenario is more complex due to proprietary issues (legal ©™), around these samples, that may not help you to work out your answer. However, it is worth trying. Stay motivated! You may be the first sharing that! All the very best.

Hi dear Adjay.

With regard to the heating rate for the pyrolysis process, it is necessary to take into account the shape and uniformity of the biomass, that is, if it is spherical, elliptical. In addition, the mass used in the pyrolysis process, whether continuous or batch, the residence time and contact with the components that transfer heat. In terms of heat transfer, the higher the heating rate, the lower the biomass uniformity and the higher the mass, the lower the conversion into condensable gases (bio-oil), with higher waste formations (pyrolytic coal), since the transfer heat is being hampered by these factors. In this way, all the variables mentioned above, also counting with the humidity of its biomass, must be thoroughly studied, depending on the objective that it intends to achieve with the pyrolysis. As for the accuracy of the data, it is really difficult to have an exact accuracy, since most biomasses are composed of hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin and the process itself is done with the degradation of the three components, generating several models to explain the pyrolysis of biomass. There are independent parallel reaction (IPR) models, which discuss the degradation of each component and the formation of others, giving an estimate of kinetic parameters (activation energy, among others).

An article on the IPR of the pyrolysis of sugarcane bagasse follows:

Warm regards,

Ferreira

The issues is the same everywhere, the low energy density of biomass. The problem looks smaller in developed countries due to the highly developed road, railway, and sea shipping systems.

Decentralization and improving energy density could help to reach out these valuable sustainable resources.

Please find one of my paper enclosed (optimization of torrefaction from economic, social and environmental perspectives):

Chemical analysis is difficult...you can use acid hydrolysis for removal lignin residue. for bleaching you can use peroxide hydrogen...for hard wood you should using higher percent of NaOH.

Hi Raj,

If you have access to a software HYSYS or AspenPlus, you can simply enter the chemical composition that you specified and the simulation software to calculate the enthalpy of the biochar. You can download at a no cost a trial version of HYSYS or AspenPlus from Aspen technologies at:

Best,

Prof. Khalil

Lignin is determined according to TAPPI T 222 om-02, alpha cellulose according to TAPPI T 203 om-93 method. Hemicellulose contents calculated as the difference between holocelluloses and alpha-cellulose content. Holoseluloses content is determined by procedures Klauditz. Please read this document, page 546.

Both Cellic CTec3 and HTec3 are produced by Novozymes and you are not going to find them in Sigma-aldrich or any similar companies as these one only have older cocktails such as Celluclast 1.5L. Currently, you can not buy directly any Cellic technology neither the older techbology (CTec and HTec) or the newer (CTec3 and HTec3). You need to contact Novozymes and request a sample for research purposes, stating what you want to achieve and you can find a form in their website.

streptomycin is good to stop fungus growth ,  I tried.. It should be added in traces.. 

Thank you Philippa

IT is already reported in literature that lignocellulosic materials when pyrolyse they do exists like islands not coming as separate layers like graphene. This might be the situation when measuring exact surface area. This argument is given by several groups when they are working with low surface area materials mainly based on lignocellulosic based. I want better argument than this just make this more clear.

You can also read the following papers:

1-Production of Biogas from Banana and Plantain Peelswww.aensiweb.com/old/aeb/2007/33-38.pdf 

2- Production of biogas from banana and …www.thefreelibrary.com › … › September 1, 2007

3- Production of Bio-ethanol from Banana …

www.academia.edu/4037924/Production_of_Bio-ethanol_from_Banana...

4- Ecuador: Banana waste for bioenergy - european-biogas.eu/2016/06/16/ecuador-banana-waste-for-bioenergy

You can find the solid biofuel properties of Acacia (heating value, proximate and ultimate analysis) in the paper:

Y. A. Lenis, L. F. Osorio, and J. F. Pérez. Fixed Bed Gasification of Wood Species with Potential as Energy Crops in Colombia: The Effect of the Physicochemical Properties. Energy Sources, Part A, 35:1608–1617, 2013.

Regards,

Juan Perez

Dear Sahil,

The following publication illustrated a design of a relatively low cost MFC chamber:

In this publication, the experiments conducted demonstrated the ability to construct low-cost, effective MFCs. For example, Design 6 was 4.3 times as cost efficient ($/mW) as the typical MFC. Using an MFC such as Design 6 for providing electricity for a city of 100,000 people where electricity costs 9.8 c/KW would save approximately $300,000 a year (Extrapolated from Logan, 2005 estimates).

In addition the use of MFCs for electricity generation can accrue benefits in terms of reduced CO2 emissions and wastewater treatment. MFCs are a largely untapped source of energy. Their application could be useful in the following areas:

1. MFCs could replace current costly secondary wastewater treatment procedures while producing electrical power that could be used both in the wastewater treatment plant and the local community.

2. MFCs constructed from cheap materials may have applications in developing countries both for the treatment of wastewater and the efficient generation of electricity.

3. MFCs can be up to 90% efficient in power production compared to 50% for typical fossil fuel power plants. Furthermore MFCs that treat wastewater would not generate any more CO2 than typical biological wastewater treatment processes. Thus their substitution for fossil fuel power plants would result in a net reduction of CO2 emissions.

For more, please see the publication contained in the attached file.

Hoping this will be helpful,

Rafik

I use the NREL protocol for lignin. It measures basically Kraft lignin and it is based in a two step acid hydrolysis. For those grasses, you will have to obtained the water and ethanol extractives first, since waxes and other components could bias the lignin determination. Attached are the protocols.

Hope it helps. 

Dear Deepayan,

In biodiesel production process, the development and research of novel and efficient ways using solid catalysts for the transesterification of inedible oil into biodiesel are the key industrial challenges. Solid acid catalysts have gained considerable attention due to their advantages of noncorrosion, non-toxicity, water tolerance, and easy separation for recycling. Novel solid acid catalysts derived from sulfonation of carbonized lignin was reported and studied extensively. Although lignin is a non-carbohydrate biopolymer with cross-linked aromatic structure, it can be carbonized in a similar way. Therefore, lignin can be heterogeneous acid catalyst for methyl ester production. 

About rice husk, after carbonized process (pyrolysis process), it can also be an appropriate catalyst for biodiesel production process as well.

Good luck,

Dang

Here are two of our publications where you can find details about volatilization of biomass (both measurements and modeling). Please refer to the literature (references) cited in these papers that may also be helpful. Best wishes.

Morey, R.V., D.L. Hatfield, R. Sears, D. Haak, D.G. Tiffany, and N. Kaliyan. 2009. Fuel properties of biomass feed streams at ethanol plants. Applied Engineering in Agriculture, 25(1): 57-64.

Zheng, H., N. Kaliyan, and R.V. Morey. 2013. Aspen Plus simulation of biomass integrated gasification combined cycle systems at corn ethanol plants. Biomass and Bioenergy, 56: 197-210.

Dear Ana,

  Its very easy to calculate the composition of any lignocellulosic biomass by detergent extraction method. The experiments are very simple to carryout and requires low cost chemicals also. This method is an approved one and I have used this method to find the biomass composition. I have attached the protocol and published paper for your reference.

We have been able to determine the amount of IL trapped with the help of ion chromatography.

Put the lignin in a tumbler (evaporator) under a vacuum with some heat e.g. 30-40 Celsius and condense the HCl and water. 2-10 mm mercury pressure should work. 50 Celsius will work even better

Thank you very much mr. Witold

There are several models that can be used to estimate the calorific value, and the choice depends on type of biomass, and author. A detailed review has been done by Vargas-Moreno et al. (2012).

J.M. Vargas-Morenoa, A.J. Callejón-Ferrea, J. Pérez-Alonsoa, B. Velázquez-Martí, A review of the mathematical models for predicting the heating value of biomass

materials, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16 (2012) 3065– 3083

I need to find lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose in banana leaf. will NDF works for it?

Thank you All

Your question is at the heart of cellulose-to-glucose conversion strategies.  I will approach the mensuration of remaining cellulose in a logical and simple manner.  First of all, you must know the mass of cellulose in the biomass on a dry basis from your NREL procedure.  Let's assume it is 100g.  Of that total amount, an amount "G" is hydrolyzed of a specific mass corresponding to glucan residues (e.g., cellobiose and other oligoglucosides).  You don't know this amount, but you can find it out by measuring the available glucose in the hydrolysate using an ion-exchange (IC) chromatograph.  You will first need to convert all oligosaccharides to saccharides using known IC sugar protocols (see the attachment for a simple hydrolyzing protocol).  Once you have all sugars in their saccharide form, you can follow the procedures listed in the publication for quantification of the glucose.  You will be able to determine a mass of glucose if you use an appropriate internal standard of known amount (an non-overlapping sugar peak, for example, or any of the ISs listed in: http://www.inorganicventures.com/product-category/ic-standards).  The tricky part is that once you have the glucose peak mass, you cannot simply assume it was all from the glucan!  You have to know what the hemicelluloses are in the original biomass.  If you are pretreating softwood, say, then the main glucose-containing hemicellulose is O-acetyl galactoGLUCOmannan.  The glucose level here is ca. 1:3 for every mannan.  Now, you must find the mannan peak and remember that for every 3 mannans, you will have 1 glucose.  Okay, so let's say that from the original pretreatment liquor we are able to calculate 3g (ensuring that we calculate correctly for the dilution in going from the original liquor to the injected one) of glucose.  We find that we have 300mg of mannose in there (from the IS calibration); thus, we will assume that in a 1:3 mass/molar relationship of glucose:mannose, we will therefore have 100mg of glucose belonging to the hemicellulose.  We then subtract 100mg from the 3gs of glucose to obtain 2.9g of glucose in the hydrolyzate.  Thus, using simple math, we will have 100g - 2.9g or 97.1g of cellulose left in the original biomass after the pretreament.

Hi,

we routinely determine the hemicellulose content of pulps, wood and process water samples by performing acid methanolysis (the published procedure can be found in the reference below). The methanolysis degrades non-cellulosic polysaccharides into their monomeric sugar units and these can then be quantified by GC-analysis using internal standard(s) and a calibration sample (also treated to methanolysis) containing sugars of known concentration.

It works well for neutral sugars, but also for uronic acids such as galacturonic and glucuronic acid (which would be quite challenging to analyze after acid hydrolysis due to degradation!). The method only requires approx. 10 mg of material.

Hardwood hemicellulose is dominated by xylans. In birch, for example, 25-30% of the wood typically consists of O-acetyl-4-O-methylglucuronoxylans.

Sundberg, A., Sundberg, K., Lillandt, C. and Holmbom, B. "Determination of hemicellulose and pectins in wood and pulp fibres by acid methanolysis and gas chromatography", Nord. Pulp Pap. Res. J., 1996, 11(4), 216-219, 226

Regards,

JR

Yes, the literature  contains a lot of published work for the production od xylose from wheat straw:

thanks but I don't quite understand. What I want to know is during the conversion of sawdust to bio oil by fast pyrolysis, do the content of phenol/phenolics present in the sawdust affect the physical/chemical/thermal/structural etc Properties of bio-oil produced in any possible way?? many thanks

The bCNG channel family has members found in over 180 different genomes, we predict that these gate in response to cyclic nucleotides in the cytosol. These channels are a part of the MscS Superfamily of ion channels, of which some members are predicted to have different  binding domains. Here is the first paper on bCNG channels. 

Yes, lignin degradation products can be used as a carbon source for ligninolytic fungi.

if your enzyme hydrolysis environment are gentle, it may can be happended that some bacterials, which have the ability consumping the reducing suger at the enzyme hydrolysis time, multiply rapidly in the liver on your sugar. maybe you should put a little ethyl acetate in this system at the first? trying again.

all the best!!!

Extracting or producing biofuel from Kayea assamica does not make meaning. Bioethanol, Biodiesel, Biogas, Biomethanol, syngas, biocrude, biochar, biohydrogen and lots of others are all bio fuels. The question should have been what biofuel?

Let me assume, from your question since you have mentioned engine application, I guess you are referring to either biodiesel or bioethanol. 

biodiesel production starts from seed oil extraction via solvent extraction or mechanical pressing. The most important is to get the oil. Secondly, the FFA value of the oil determines the method for biodiesel production. esterification is required when the FFA value is greater than 2%. otherwise, transesterification will serve.

Transesterification involves the reaction of the oil with an alcohol such as methanol to produce fatty acids methyl esters [Biodiesel] and glycerol. Biodiesel is less dense and can be separated by gravity separation.

Hello Leah

I think TEM images of the digested cellulose is a good start to confirm the shape (thin rods). Then determining Degree of Polymerization and crystallinity (using XRD) will be a supporting evidences. Digesting cellulose will not produce hemicelluloses, it will produce oligosaccharides. You can hydrolyze with an acid to glucose and determine them using HPLC.

I agree with James. Note that CMC is a very good substrate for endoglucanases, but that it is not attacked by cellobiohydrolases. Many cellobiohydrolases will digest chromo- or fluorogenic cellobiosides, like p-nitrophenyl-beta cellobioside or methylumbelliferyl-beta-cellobioside, which make for easy assays. In addition, cellulase sytems need a means to remove cellobiose, which is an inhibitor of cellobiohydrolases. This can be achieved either by uptake systems, which internalize cellobiose and cellodextrins, or by betaglucosidases, which hydrolyze cellobiose ito glucose

Hello,

This is just a previous information. I think you can connect them (novacana) to more details.

I think that you can connect to some Professor of ESALQ (Superior School of Agriculture "Luiz de Queiroz" that integrates University of Sao Paulo), too. It's the School that I studied and it has tradition on this type of research. I'm almost sure that they can help you. If you want, I can help you with the name to connect to.

Good luck

@ Dr Henrik Romar, in case of further works and a possible column blocking, which alternative mobile phase would you recommend ?

Dr. Chandrasekaran,

A number of additional methods (beside AFM, TEM, and SEM) can be used to tell the changes of your biomass samples.  For example XPS can tell you the changes of chemical elements on surfaces.  BET analysis can tell you the changes of surface area of your particles.

Good luck

Maohong Fan 

A lot of plants use manure. It enhances process stability due to high buffer capacity and contains anorganic nutrients.

Another natural source of Mg might be wood ash.

Easiest way (may work for you): put sticky carbon tape on specimen stub, press it in sawdust, knock out excess of the dust (with hard knocks on a table), apply conductive coating, put it in SEM.

Sawdust should be dry; if needed let it air dry for a while.

in our country. the rhizomes which have root, were separated from mother plants and were cut to 15-20 cm and planted in moist soil

Dilute sulfuric acid is best for pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass. SEM and XRD sowed that lignin and wax was removed successfully and crystallinity was decreased. See the attached paper.

I think NREL protocol is suitable for the analysis, if there HPLC is available. Attached is the protocol.

Dear Deepti and Selvaraju,

thank you very much for the suggestion. I had a hard time finding vendor.

I want to duly notify that I have stopped working on this project

It strikes me, sometimes when using errosive strains /Trametes versicolor, Phanerochaete chrysosporium/ of white-rot fungi, a small amount of D-glucose to water prior to biomass sterillization can be added. The aim is to supress the fungi production of cellulolytic enzymes.

When smaller dimensions biomass particles are used for biopulping, the suspension of an inoculum may be sprayed /sprinkled/ directly onto them. After homogenzation the inoculated material is transported into the bioreactor.    

This may really depend on the reaction environment (e.g. basic, acidic, high temperature/pressure, etc.) of cellulose and urea. I will suggest you try to search literature using model compounds first. 

Yet, I can give an exmaple about possible reactions of cellulose and amino acids (which may be used to synthesize urea during th hydrothermal liquefaction reaction) under high temperature/pressure conditions. The monosaccharides from lignocellulose may react with amino acids to form melanoidin via  Maillard reaction under HTL. Furthermore information about using model compounds can be found in this PhD disserataion, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/26090. Or, please feel free to check the suggested publication from our group as well.

Hope this helps. Good luck.  

At 175 C the vapor volume of a 1 ul injection of water is around 1000 ul which is more than many injection liners can tolerate, so you will get flashback into the carrier gas lines to the injector. This can cause a lot of problems, including carryover and imprecision. As Kae Kwon said, you need a higher oven temperature, but also reduce the injection volume. A lot of analysts are afraid of injecting water, but most modern bonded phase columns can tolerate water without degradation. However, you do not mention what type of capillary column you are using. It should be a polar phase to give good retention and peak shape, such as a bonded Carbowax. It could also be done on a PLOT column such as Rt-Q-BOND. Also, the ethanol must elute well separated from the water. If they co-elute then the disturbance of the FID will yield very poor precision. Check the literature of your column supplier for the application.

Mark,

That is assuming that the lab in question has such equipment available.

You can use the NREL protocol or the Van Soest protocol. Value from the two protocol can be different especially for lignin. The first method have tendency to surestimate whereas the second one to underestimate. In the NREL protocol, the content of lignin is surestimated for lignocellulosic biomass having protein. For this, the NREL protocol recomand to determine the content of protein in the lignin extracted.

Please refer this link for protocols: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ep.11757/pdf

I think cellulose hydrolysate is a sugar rich solution. You can use it as a carbon source for microbial growth or fermentation. If you need biodiesel for your engine, it is reasonably enough to use it for cultivating oleaginous micro-organisms; as well for ethanol you can use it for yeast fermentation. In my opinion, the most important concern is how to produce sugars from lignocellulosic efficiently; currently we need pre-treatment, enzymatic hydrolysis, or even detoxification if the pre-treatment generates toxic compounds. These all are cost-extensive.

kinetics is of great importance for reactor design and scale-up. however, due to the complex composition and reactions during biomass pyrolysis, a traditional kinetics study is hard to performed. The TGA method using models, such as single reaction model, parallel reaction model and DAEM, could obtain some useful kinetics data. but the kinetics is not clear. maybe lumping kinetics could be more useful.

Typically, biomass agglomerates do not contain a binder. It's too expensive. wood pellets for instance normally rely on the heat of extrusion to melt the lignins which re-solidify on cooling. Some processes. such as puck production, rely on very high pressures and selection of an appropriate particle size distribution.

I am sorry, the first answer concerns more determination of hemi. in various pulps. than hemi. in wood and plants. The following method is similar, simpler and more suitable for erstimation of hemi. contents.

1. Prepare holocllusose and determine contens of ash and res. lignin in the preparation.

2. Extract holocellulose with 5% KOH for 2h at temp. of 20oC /hydromodul:1g of holo. to 60 ml of hydroxide H2O solution. The procedure is carried out in N2 atmosphere

with tiny stream of gas passing through the suspension.You will obtain solution of hemicelluoses A fraction /first filtrate/

3. Separate solid particles of holo. using a S3 glas funnel and vacuum. Transfer the solid into the extraction flask and add 60 ml of 24 % KOH solution in water. Let the extration proceed for 24 h in N2 atmosphere again. Separate solid residuum /alpha-cellulose/, wash it with H2O, than with acetic acid acidified water , with hot water and acetone. Dry the solid at 102 oC and weigh.The filtrate contains fraction of hemi. B.

Then you may determine hemicelluloses in two ways:

a/ Directly. Neutralise both extracts with acetic acid and precipitate hemi. /fractions A and B/ purring them into 3 triple volume of ethanol containing 0.1 % of HCl, centrifuge precipitates. Wash precipitates with diethyl ether, dry at 102oC and weigh.

b/ Indirectly from weight of dry residuum after extractions.

In both ways /A and B/ express the contents of hemi in % of the initial weight of holocellulose preparation reduced for ash and res. lignin contents.

Regards,

R. S.

We are loading gas tests, specifications and lots of pictures of our 200kWe PowerCan units on PowerCan200 in LinkedIn Groups, please join us and share your views. We are about to enter the final stage of our Research and Development for an off the shelf range of PowerCan 200 and we look forward to share with our select group of followers. We have developed a particularly interesting gas reform unit

The problem you're laying out isn't very simple, because we're working with a polymer that refuses to dissolve in any solvent, necessitating the use of CP-MAS NMR, or some sort of a degradative analysis (pyrolysis-GCMS etc.). One plan would be to get representative samples, do NMR (good luck!) to determine their degree of condensation accurately, then do principal component analysis on the IR spectra, and correlate the two. (See references in my article in RSC Adv. for NMR interpretation.)

In Randy Lewis's lab at BYU we detected ethanol using GC directly from the supernatant of a bacterial suspension. This was handy because we could then detect other products such as acetic acid as well. I admit I don't know the full protocol as I was not personally the one doing the GC, but if you get in contact with Dr. Lewis he might be able to give you more specifics or point you in the right direction. He is in the Chemical Engineering department.

I always worry in the situation where you are observing a polymeric material such as cellulose and hemicellulose and even lignin that are not happy in the same solvent system as to what you are not seeing when you look at it in the liquid-state. We've done a lot of alginate and chitosan analysis and unless you reduce the degree of polymerization you run into issues of not observing the high Mw material and skewing your results. If you can look at in the solid-state you can be confident you are seeing the whole thing. I wish more people would look at polymeric polysaccharides with solid-state nMR because the sample preparation for liquid-state NMR can be a bit of a long-winded nightmare.

@Ravindra - how do the samples look to an FTIR-ATR - they may be more uniquely observable.

I would start at this web site - http://lipidlibrary.aocs.org/topics/extract2/index.htm . I have found it to be very useful in the past.

What is the scope of your efficiency that you are interested in? The GREET model by Argonne National Lab might be your best source of data (albeit a plethora of data) http://greet.es.anl.gov/

I might have some more insight if I know your exact scope? Are you considering the harvesting? Thermochemical conversion or only biochemical? Are you limiting yourself to a specific technology or fuel?

In fact, all alkali metal oxides (except Fr2O) can act as catalysts in form of mixed oxides. A few commonly used examples are given as (more are available in the literature):

[I] Li2O is used both in Li-O2 (g) cells as well as in the catalytic oxidation of H2O2.

[II] Na2O- alumina is used in the isomerization of olefins.

[III] Sodium ferrite (Na2O+Fe2O3 fused) is used in catalytic decomposition of NO (g).

[IV]Na2 Mo4 (Na2O+MoO3) is used in oxidation of methanol to formaldehyde.

[V] Potassium ferrite (K2O+Fe2O3 fused) enhances speed of the formation of styrene, benzene, toluene from their constituent atoms at 620C. Also it causes dehydrogenation of ethyl benzene at 970 C.

[VI]Rb2O and Cs2O both together and also with their mixture with K2O and Na2O can be used both in the dehydrogenation of ethyl benzene as well as in the conversion of alkenes to alkynes.

Dear All,

Great day. I m really sorry for late respond.

Thank you all the answers provided.

Let take example:

cellulase activity was determined at 70 FPU/ml.

(followed Ghose's Method, 1987)

Q1.

2% substrate in 30ml working volume for 5 days (120 h). 30 FPU would be used,

then how many (ml / ul) of cellulase enzyme should add into above conditions (2% in 30ml)? Could show the way to calculate?

Q2.

If the B-glucosidase activity was determined at 2.8 U/ml (using 1% salicin as substrate).

How many (ml / ul) of B-glucosidase enzyme should add into above conditions (2% in 30 ml)

If cellulase to B-glucosidase ratio is 5:1

If cellulase to B-glucosidase ratio is 1:5

Could show the way to calculate?

I am novice in ligocellulose enzymatic study. Hence, seeking technical advice and your expertise.

Hope can hear from you guys soon.

Thank you in advance.