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In an integrated biorefinery concept, biological hydrogen and methane production from lignocellulosic substrates appears to be one of the most promising alternatives to produce energy from renewable sources. However, lignocellulosic substrates present compositional and structural features that can limit their conversion into biohydrogen and methane. In this study, biohydrogen and methane potentials of 20 lignocellulosic residues were evaluated. Compositional (lignin, cellulose, hemicelluloses, total uronic acids, proteins, and soluble sugars) as well as structural features (crystallinity) were determined for each substrate. Two predictive partial least square (PLS) models were built to determine which compositional and structural parameters affected biohydrogen or methane production from lignocellulosic substrates, among proteins, total uronic acids, soluble sugars, crystalline cellulose, amorphous holocelluloses, and lignin. Only soluble sugars had a significant positive effect on biohydrogen production. Besides, methane potentials correlated negatively to the lignin contents and, to a lower extent, crystalline cellulose showed also a negative impact, whereas soluble sugars, proteins, and amorphous hemicelluloses showed a positive impact. These findings will help to develop further pretreatment strategies for enhancing both biohydrogen and methane production.

Hydrous iridium oxide (IrOx) nanoparticles (NPs) with an average diameter of 1.7 ± 0.3 nm were prepared via photochemical hydrolysis of iridium chloride in alkaline medium at room temperature. The photoinduced hydrolysis was monitored by time-dependent ultraviolet-visible (UV-vis) spectroscopy, and the effects of the incident wavelength and irradiation time on the production of IrOx NPs were systematically investigated. It was found that UV-vis irradiation is crucial for the generation of IrOx NPs during the hydrolysis of IrCl3, and once the irradiation was turned off, the hydrolysis reaction stopped immediately. The production rate of IrOx NPs greatly depended on the incident wavelength. There is a critical wavelength of 500 nm for the hydrolysis reaction, and IrOx NPs can only be produced under the illumination with an incident wavelength shorter than 500 nm. Moreover, the shorter the incident wavelength, the faster the growth rate of IrOx NPs. The obtained IrOx NPs were highly stable during two months of storage at 4 °C. The Ir/IrOx nanocomposites were prepared by surface reduction of IrOx NPs with NaBH4. The microstructure of the Ir/IrOx composite was characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and the presence of zero-valence Ir was confirmed by the X-ray diffraction (XRD) result. The Ir/IrOx nanocomposite exhibited good catalytic activity and high recycling stability toward the reduction of 4-nitrophenol. The catalytic activity per unit surface area of the Ir/IrOx composite catalyst was increased by a factor of 15 compared to that of pure Ir catalyst. The presence of the Ir/IrOx interfaces in the composite catalyst is believed to be responsible for the high activity.

Hygroscopic behavior is an inherent characteristic of nanocellulose which strongly affects its applications. In this study, the water vapor sorption behavior of four nanocellulose samples, such as cellulose nanocrystals and nanofibers with cellulose I and II structures (cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) I, CNC II, cellulose nanofibers (CNF) I, and CNF II) were studied by dynamic vapor sorption. The highly reproducible data including the running time, real-time sample mass, target relative humidity (RH), actual RH, and isotherm temperature were recorded during the sorption process. In analyzing these data, significant differences in the total running time, equilibrium moisture content, sorption hysteresis and sorption kinetics between these four nanocellulose samples were confirmed. It was important to note that CNC I, CNC II, CNF I, and CNF II had equilibrium moisture contents of 21.4, 28.6, 33.2, and 38.9%, respectively, at a RH of 95%. Then, the sorption kinetics behavior was accurately described by using the parallel exponential kinetics (PEK) model. Furthermore, the Kelvin-Voigt model was introduced to interpret the PEK behavior and calculate the modulus of these four nanocellulose samples.

In this work, we have prepared a p-type semiconductor of Cu2O decorated with MoS2 nanosheets as cocatalyst for efficient solar hydrogen production under visible light. Results show that Cu2O decorated with 1.0 wt % MoS2 presents the maximum reduction photocurrent density of 0.17 mA cm–2, which is 7-fold higher than pristine Cu2O. Furthermore, the as-prepared MoS2@Cu2O exhibits remarkable photostability with only 7% loss of its original photocurrent after 9 h of continuous work. The excellent performance of MoS2@Cu2O is ascribed to the introduction of active sites of MoS2 nanosheets as cocatalyst to the surface of Cu2O nanoparticles, which activates the photocatalyst by lowering the electrochemical proton reduction overpotential and also inhibits photoinduced corrosion during the measurement.

The Cu-Pt nanocrystal (NC) samples with concisely controlled atomic ratios (Cu : Pt) are prepared by a facile strategy. We demonstrate that Cu-Pt (3 : 1) NCs exhibit the highest activity and faradaic efficiency in the CO2 electroreduction reaction among all the as-prepared samples.

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A novel fluorescent nanocellulosic hydrogel based on carbon dots for efficient adsorption and sensitive sensing of heavy metals was synthesized.