New Approaches for Producing Sugars and Hydrocarbon Fuels from Lignocellulose
Wednesday, January 22 at 4:00pm - Frazier Rogers Hall Conference Room 122
Xuejun Pan, Ph. D. Associate Professor
Department of Biological Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
It is a consensus that lignocellulosic biomass will be an alternative source of fuels, chemicals, and materials in the future. The research activities in Pan’s lab aim at developing innovative technologies to convert lignocellulose to platform chemicals, liquid fuels for transportation, and biomaterials. This talk is to introduce a few new technologies they developed recently for biomass conversion: (1) cellulose hydrolysis to glucose by cellulase-mimetic porous polymeric solid acids; (2) direct and fast saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass in molten salt hydrates for producing sugars under mild conditions without pretreatment; and (3) one-pot method for converting lignocellulosic biomass to drop-in hydrocarbon fuels.
Dr. Pan’s areas of interest include (1) pretreatment and fractionation of lignocellulosic biomass; (2) enzymatic and chemical saccharification of lignocellulose; (3) chemical and biological conversion of lignocellulose to chemicals and liquid fuels; (4) high-value utilization of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin; and (5) fundamental understanding of physical and chemical changes of plant cell wall during biorefining.
