Porous Material From Biomass Process Residue Rich in Cellulose and Its Application

Abstract: The processes of light industry with agricultural feedstock have to produce solid wastes, called process residues usually, along with its conversion of the feedstock into products of food, drink and medicine. The lees of distilled spirit and vinegar contain rice husk of up to 50 wt.% and represent the typical biomass process residues rich in cellulose. They can be effectively treated and utilized via thermochemical conversion technologies including direct combustion, pyrolysis and gasification. Supposing that the silica in the residues could be a kind of structure frame, we recently tested the approach of manufacturing porous materials from spirit lees (SL) and vinegar lees (VL) and examined their applications to aqueous phenol adsorption and NO catalytic reduction. Porous materials rich in pores were prepared with both SL and VL under the optimized carbonization and activation condition, the resulting material had specific surface area and micropore volume equivalent to the high-quality commercial activated carbon. The prepared material showed good capability to adsorb aqueous phenol and generated also good catalytic activity for reduction of NO by NH3 when it was used as the support of Mn- and V-base catalyst. Thus, making porous material from biomass process residue rich in cellulose is not only technical feasible but realizes also the high-value utilization of the residues.

Keywords: Process residue, Lees, Porous material, Phenol adsorption, NO catalytic reduction.