Small-Angle Scattering by Cellulose: Structural changes in cellulosic materials under chemical and mechanical treatments

Humanity needs to increase use of renewable sources of materials and energy. Biomass can be used for both of these needs. Cellulose is the main component of biomass. Understanding the multi-level hierarchical structure of cellulose holds the key tomultiple applications of this material. One of the promising applications of lignocellulsic biomass is the production of bioethanol as a replacement for fossil fuels. Yearly production of biomass could potentially supply enough bio-ethanol to completely replace gasoline. However, it would require dramatic increase in the efficiency of the bioethanol production. The main obstacle to the development of bioethanol production into a sustainable process is the recalcintrance of cellulose which was developed throughout entire plant evolution. In order to overcome this obstacle an important step was incorporated into the process, i.e. pretreatment of biomass. Amultitude of pretreatments have been developed and applied to disrupt the structure of lignocellulosic biomass. However it is still not clear, which structural parameters are responsible for the success of a certain pretreatment technique.