Enhanced ethanol production from stalk juice of sweet sorghum by response surface methodology

Sweet sorghum (sugar sorghum, Sorghum bicolor) is one kind of non-grain energy crops. As a novel green regenerated high-energy crop with high utility value, high yield of biomass, the sweet sorghum is widely used and developed in China. Stalk juice of sweet sorghum was used as the main substrate for ethanol production by a Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain because of the high content of sugar. Effects of different medium compositions, including urea, KH2PO4 and MgSO4, on ethanol production were studied by response surface methodology in this paper. A second-order model that related the concentration of ethanol was developed and thus the optimal medium composition was obtained, which was 4.75 g l-1 urea, 3.58 g l-1 KH2PO4, and 0.98 g l-1 MgSO4. Under this condition, the highest ethanol concentration reached 86.2 g l-1.Key words: Ethanol, sweet sorghum, stalk juice, medium composition, response surface methodology

Wood-Inspired Morphologically Tunable Aligned Hydrogel for High-Performance Flexible All-Solid-State Supercapacitors

Oriented microstructures are widely found in various biological systems for multiple functions. Such anisotropic structures provide low tortuosity and sufficient surface area, desirable for the design of high-performance energy storage devices. Despite significant efforts to develop supercapacitors with aligned morphology, challenges remain due to the predefined pore sizes, limited mechanical flexibility, and low mass loading. Herein, a wood-inspired flexible all-solid-state hydrogel supercapacitor is demonstrated by morphologically tuning the aligned hydrogel matrix toward high electrode-materials loading and high areal capacitance. The highly aligned matrix exhibits broad morphological tunability (47–12 µm), mechanical flexibility (0°–180° bending), and uniform polypyrrole loading up to 7 mm thick matrix. After being assembled into a solid-state supercapacitor, the areal capacitance reaches 831 mF cm−2 for the 12 µm matrix, which is 259% times of the 47 µm matrix and 403% times of nonaligned matrix. The supercapacitor also exhibits a high energy density of 73.8 µWh cm−2, power density of 4960 µW cm−2, capacitance retention of 86.5% after 1000 cycles, and bending stability of 95% after 5000 cycles. The principle to structurally design the oriented matrices for high electrode material loading opens up the possibility for advanced energy storage applications