BBE 1002 Biorenewables Blog

Three Things You Need to Know About Bioproducts Welcome back, everyone! Today I'm going to tell y'all about how we turn crops into sugar, how the process of fermentation works, and finally I'll introduce you to a new biobased product that I'm super excited about. Let's dive right in.   Sugar Glucose is a simple sugar (a monosaccharide), and we use it for tons of stuff, including plastics and fuel. So, how do we get glucose out of plants? First, we categorize biomass into three groups: sugar crops, starchy biomass, and lignocellulosic biomass. ( Lesson 18 )   ( Plant Biomass )                          We get sugar from sugar crops by putting the canes or roots through a mill to extract their juice, which we then purify and refine to produce sugar. Corn is the primary starch used for sugar; to extract sugar from corn we grind it up in a mill to produce the starch which is then hydrolyzed with dilute acids or e...

Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals Hey everyone! This week's blog is fun for me because it's all about lumber, which is something with which I'm very familiar. I spent the first few years of my life in the lumber store that my parents owned, and I've done a lot of woodworking, using lathes with my dad, who's a woodworker and has made a lot of furniture and artistic pieces, and doing construction work on our houses! Because of this experience, I know a bit about different types of wood and their uses; like how cedar is good for siding, pine is good for framing, and hardwoods like white oak and hickory (which is super hard) are good for furniture. However, there was still a lot about wood that I didn't know from my own experience with it. For example, I didn't know about engineered wood or paper products, and I hadn't interacted much with the concept of carbon neutrality. Now that I do and I have, I'm ready to tell you all about it! Engine...