Lignocellulosic materials

Biomass is a renewable and sustainable resource that offers enormous potential for producing heat, power, chemicals, fuels, and other bioproducts that today are almost entirely fossil-derived. Biomass includes wood logs and residues, forest thinning and residues, dedicated energy crops, agricultural residues, and organic wastes produced from industrial facilities, farms, and households. The properties of biomass are influenced by their chemical composition, constituent interactions, spatial distribution, and physical characteristics. Understanding biomass composition is critical to follow the thermochemical reactions and to predict product yields. This chapter presents a multiscale view of the physical structure of lignocellulosic biomass and the composition of its constituent chemical families. In this chapter, we focus on wood because understanding this material also helps us better understand the structure and properties of other lignocellulosic resources. We describe the chemical composition of cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, and extractives and the existing methods for their quantification and characterization. This chapter also describes how the experimental information obtained can be used with the aid of novel algorithms to obtain an explicit representation of the chemical composition of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.