Guest Editors
Riyang Shu, Associate Professor, Guangdong University of Technology, China.
Riyang Shu is a specialist in Biomass Catalytic Conversion. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017 and acted as a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore in 2018. Prof. Shu’s research interests mainly focus on the catalytic conversion of renewable biomasses into fuels and chemicals. He has published more than 45 papers in SCI indexed papers and been cited over 1100 times in his career.
Ying Xu, Professor, Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
Ying Xu is a professor in Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She received his Ph.D. degree from the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. Her main research interests are mainly the development of lignin conversion processes to produce renewable chemicals, liquid fuels and carbon-based materials. She has co-authored more than 70 SCI papers in journals cited over 3000 times.
Summary
Lignin, as one of the main components of renewable lignocellulosic biomass, is a three-dimensional amorphous polymer composed of methoxylated phenylpropane units. Compared to the cellulose and hemicellulose, lignin has much more complex structure, which results in great difficulty in depolymerization. While, due to the high specific energy content and the abundance of aromatic units, lignin presents a preferable prospect in producing high value chemicals and fuels. A large amount of technical lignin are produced from the pulp industry and bioethanol production plants each year. For 2020, the production of technical lignin increases to nearly 1 billion liters. However, most of the technical lignin have been used as waste or just burnt for heat, which leads to a great loss of resource, as well as environmental pollution.
The complex and random structure of lignin brings great difficulty to its effective valorization. Lignin structure depends strongly on the plant species and shows local and seasonal variation. Moreover, the lignin structure will also be condensed significantly during the pretreatment or pulping processes. These factors hamper the effective utilization of technical lignin. This Special Issue, lignin catalytic valorization for the production of chemicals and fuels, seeks high-quality works on the effective processes and technologies related to conversion of lignin to chemicals and fuels. We welcome original research papers and reviews related to (but are not limited to) the following themes:
• Lignin catalytic depolymerization
• Hydrodeoxygenation of lignin-derived compounds for fuels
• Valorization of lignin-derived compounds for chemicals
• Novel catalysts for lignin conversion
• Biomass conversion
Keywords
Lignin; depolymerization; hydrodeoxygenation; chemicals; biofuels; catalysts
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