Microwave absorption characteristics of liquid compounds for an efficient microwave pretreatment system of woody biomass toward bioethanol production

It is an essential problem to unbind lignin, which is one of the components of woody biomass, efficiently when we produce bioethanol from woody biomass. We study on a pretreatment system by microwave irradiation to solve this problem. It is important to understand the permittivity characteristics of liquid compounds, which consist of woody biomass, water, solvents and acid, to design an efficient pretreatment system. In this paper, we first describe evaluation of the permittivity characteristics of solvents whose weight ratio and temperature are as parameters by using the coaxial tube reflection method. Next, we describe 3D electromagnetic simulations of a microwave irradiation part of the pretreatment system.