Pretreatment efficiency and structural characterization of rice straw by an integrated process of dilute-acid and steam explosion for bioethanol production.

The combined pretreatment of rice straw using dilute-acid and steam explosion followed by enzymatic hydrolysis was investigated and compared with acid-catalyzed steam explosion pretreatment. In addition to measuring the chemical composition, including glucan, xylan and lignin content, changes in rice straw features after pretreatment were investigated in terms of the straw's physical properties. These properties included crystallinity, surface area, mean particle size and scanning electron microscopy imagery.

Characterization and structure evolution of Ca-Al-CO3 hydrotalcite film for high temperature CO2 adsorption.

In this work, monodispersed layered double hydroxide (Ca-Al LDHs) nanoparticles were synthesized by hydrothermal coprecipitation. Uniform thin films of layered double hydroxide on porous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) substrates were formed by a direct precipitation process in a homogeneous suspension containing monodispersed Ca-Al layered double hydroxide nanoparticles. It was found that the formation of a designed hydrotalcite-like phase is strongly dependent on the [Ca(2+)]/[Al(3+)] ratios, and that a minor CaCO3 phase could possibly form simultaneously, which is attributed to the greater insolubility of CaCO3 and the incompatibility of the ionic size of Al and Ca.