Читать книгу Handbook of Biomass Valorization for Industrial Applications - Группа авторов - Страница 25

To reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and environmental pollution caused due to consumption of these fuels, renewable fuel production from biomass is in great demand and gained the focus of attention of academic and industrial researchers since the last decade.

In this process, water is used on a semiconducting material for photocatalyzing to generate hydrogen and oxygen [5]. In electrochemical cell, an electrode made of TiO₂ is connected to black platinum electrode. Due to visible incident light, the flow of electrons starts in the direction from TiO₂ electrode to black platinum electrode and at this point, the generation of hydrogen and oxygen can be done at cathode and anode, respectively. According to heterogeneous photocatalysis mechanism, oxygen is produced by oxidizing water through photo generated holes which acts as electron scavengers and rest electrons are responsible to generate hydrogen in reduction reaction. Research on photocatalytic conversion of biomass derived materials is available on use of pure organic molecule as model compound or biomass organic wastes. As we all know the model compounds are not directly found by organic biomass wastes so isolation or transformation reactions are required for this purpose. For example, methanol is procured from biomass wastes by using various valorization technologies such as gasification and some catalytic transformation of syngas. Undesired reactions are possible due to mixture in biomass wastes and this mixture passes through some transformation processes to reduce impurity or separation so that the good performance of desired reactions can be enhanced. Some other organic compounds as ethanol, acetic acid, formic acid are not suitable for raw biomass for conversion in high purity chemical products. But on the other side, glycerol, carbohydrate, and lignin derived from biomass provide high purity of product from various industries such as biodiesel refinery, agriculture, and wood or paper industry.