Wheat straw has been used for a number of applications such as a bioabsorbent for waste water treatment (Sun 2010) and as a composite material reinforcement (Panthapulakkal et al. 2006). More recently, biofuel derived from wheat straw has been attracting more and more attention due to the future potential shortages of fossil fuel (Kristensen et al. 2008). One of the crucial steps of producing bio-ethanol from wheat straw is its pre-treatment which should facilitate the economic feasibility and yield efficient conversion into biofuel. This pre-treatment is expected to increase the accessible chemical sites of the straw, i.e. increase the fibre surface area as well as its hydrophilicity via the removal of waxes, also increase the total amorphous content and decrease the crystallinity of cellulose. The important surface chemical information on wheat straw including BET surface area and water sorption kinetics may be obtained using the Dynamic Vapour Sorption (DVS) technique (Heng et al. 2011).
Keywords: Dynamic Vapor Sorption (DVS), wheat straw, biofuel
Authors
M. Guo
M. Naderi
S. Ahmed
M. Acharya
D. Cattaneo
D. Burnett
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