The pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass with a functional DES that incorporates choline chloride (ChCl) and glyoxylic acid (GA) resulted in a high removal of lignin and hemicellulose, lignin stabilization, and cellulose functionalization.
Abstract Nanofiltration (NF) membranes circumventing global water scarcity with excellent separation and antibacterial performances are highly desirable for efficient water treatment but remain a great challenge. Herein, a nanofiltration membrane was fabricated by in situ immobilizing silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) on sulfated cellulose nanofibril incorporated during interfacial polymerization. AgNPs were confirmed to be uniformly distributed and in situ grown on sulfated cellulose nanofibril (SCNF) due to its abundant sulfate and hydroxyl groups by mixing them with anhydrous piperazine solution as inorganic phase and homophenyl chloride n-hexane solution as the organic phase on the surface of a polyethersulfone microporous membrane. The attributes of SCNF, excellent hydrophilicity, and highly negative charges enhanced both the rejection and water permeability. As the SCNF charge increased, the roughness of SCNF increased and the contact angle decreased, and the maximum values were 203 nm and 17.67°, respectively. Among all the composite NF membranes, H-SCNF/Ag-0.01 had better rejection of Na 2 SO 4 and NaCl, with a maximum rejection of 97.11% and 32.55%, respectively. Meanwhile, it also maintained high water permeability. Antibacterial experiments indicated that the composite NF membrane had effective inhibition against Escherichia coli and exhibited an expected slow-release capability of Ag + , which made it have long-term antibacterial properties. It was estimated that the antibacterial effect could last for 90 days. This work demonstrated that AgNPs in situ immobilization on SCNF could be used as promising nanofillers for designing advanced functional NF membranes.
This paper presents an innovative study on the green production of furfural using a covalent organic framework as a heterogeneous catalyst, thereby achieving efficient furfural production from sustainable biomass-derived sugars.
China has initiated various dedicated policies on clean energy substitution for polluting fossil-fuels since the early 2010s to alleviate severe carbon emissions and environmental pollution and accelerate clean energy transformation. Using the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) regression, we project the potentials of substituting coal and oil with clean energy for different production sectors in China toward the year 2030. Based on the projections, a dynamic multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium model, CHINAGEM, is employed to examine: the impacts of future clean energy substitution on China’s energy production, outputs of non-energy sectors, macro-economy, and CO2 emissions. First, we found that most production sectors are projected to replace polluting fossil-fuels with clean energy in their terminal energy consumption in 2017–2030. Second, clean energy substitution enables producing green co-benefits that would enable improvements in energy production structure, reductions in national CO2 emissions, and better real GDP and employment. Third, technological progress in non-fossil-fuel electricity could further benefit China’s clean and low-carbon energy transformation, accelerating the reduction in CO2 emissions and clean energy substitution. Furthermore, the most beneficiary are energy-intensive and high carbon-emission sectors owing to the drop in coal and oil prices, while the most negatively affected are the downstream sectors of electricity. Through research, various tentative improvement policies are recommended, including financial support, renewable electricity development, clean energy utilization technology, and clean coal technologies.
Heteroatom-doped porous carbon has become a key material in the field of supercapacitors (SCs) and the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Here, eucalyptus pulping red liquor was used as the starting material for a straightforward one-step NH4Cl-assisted carbonization technique that produced a nitrogen and sulfur codoped bifunctional porous carbon material. The sulfur in sodium lignosulfonate was used as a S atom dopant. NH4Cl added to the red liquor can not only produce NaCl as a template but also as a nitrogen source. The resulting carbons possess rich hierarchical porous structures and high specific surface area (1092 m2 g–1) and ID/IG ratio (1.04), leading to remarkable electrocatalytic activity with a specific capacitance of 326 F g–1 at 0.5 A g–1 for capacitance and an identical onset and half-wave potentials of 0.988 V vs reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE) and 0.847 V vs RHE for the ORR, as compared with the benchmark Pt/C catalyst. Furthermore, when BLC-N/S-1000 was used as an electrocatalyst in an air electrode of a zinc–air battery, it showed superior long-term stability for 356 h at 5 mA cm–2 and 20 min/cycle. Results in the present work pave a new green method to convert abundant low-cost biomass into high-end heteroatom-doped carbons with rich hierarchical porous structures for electrochemical energy devices.
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