SANS study of cellulose extracted from switchgrass

✍ Scribed by Pingali, Sai Venkatesh ;Urban, Volker S. ;Heller, William T. ;McGaughey, Joseph ;O'Neill, Hugh M. ;Foston, Marcus ;Myles, Dean A. ;Ragauskas, Arthur J. ;Evans, Barbara R.

• Book ID: 104478565
• Publisher: International Union of Crystallography
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 182 KB
• Volume: 66
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0907-4449
• DOI: 10.1107/s0907444910020408

✦ Synopsis

Lignocellulosic biomass, which is an abundant renewable natural resource, has the potential to play a major role in the generation of renewable biofuels through its conversion to bioethanol. Unfortunately, it is a complex biological composite material that shows significant recalcitrance, making it a cost-ineffective feedstock for bioethanol production. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) was employed to probe the multi-scale structure of cellulosic materials. Cellulose was extracted from milled native switchgrass and from switchgrass that had undergone a dilute acid pretreatment method in order to disrupt the lignocellulose structure. The high-Q structural feature (Q > 0.07 Å(-1)) can be assigned to cellulose fibrils based on a comparison of cellulose purified by solvent extraction of native and dilute acid pretreated switchgrass and a commercial preparation of microcrystalline cellulose. Dilute acid pretreatment results in an increase in the smallest structural size, a decrease in the interconnectivity of the fibrils and no change in the smooth domain boundaries at length scales larger than 1000 Å.