The pursuit of sustainable hydrocarbon alternatives to fossil fuels has prompted an acceleration in the development of new technologies for biomass processing.Microwave pyrolysis of biomass has long been recognised to provide better quality bio-products in shorter timescales compared to conventional pyrolysis. Although this topic has been widely assessed and many investigations are currently ongoing, this article gives an overview beyond the physico-chemical pyrolysis process and covers engineering aspects and the limitations of microwave heating technology. Herein, we provide innovative scalable concepts to perform the microwave pyrolysis of biomass on a large scale, including essential energy and material handling requirements. Furthermore, some of the possible socio-economic and environmental implications derived from the use of this technology in our society are discussed. Such potential concepts are expected to assist the needs of the industrial bioenergy community to move this largely studied process upwards in scale.

No abstract

In this work, we introduce a hybrid atomic-force/near-field scanning microwave microscope, exploiting the tomographic capabilities of the microwave microscopy to explore structures of relevant interest, namely, samples involving both biological and non-biological materials at the same time. In particular, we show imaging of C2C12 muscle cells grown in the presence of bundles of multi-walled carbon nanotubes: here, the microwave microscopy, by virtue of its tomographic potentiality, highlights how cells incorporate some nanotubes in their fibers

Microwave energy was demonstrated to be potentially beneficial for reducing the cost of several steps of the mining process. Significant literature was developed about this topic but few studies are focused on understanding the interaction between microwaves and minerals at a fundamental level in order to elucidate the underlying physical processes that control the observed phenomena. This is ascribed to the complexity of such phenomena, related to chemical and physical transformations, where electrical, thermal and mechanical forces play concurrent roles. In this work a new characterization method for the dielectric properties of mineral samples at microwave frequencies is presented. The method is based upon the scanning microwave microscopy technique that enables measurement of the dielectric constant, loss factor and conductivity with extremely high spatial resolution and accuracy. As opposed to conventional dielectric techniques, the scanning microwave microscope can then access and measure the dielectric properties of micrometric-sized mineral inclusions within a complex structure of natural rock. In this work two micrometric hematite inclusions were characterized at a microwave frequency of 3 GHz. Scanning electron microscopy/energydispersive x-ray spectroscopy and confocal micro-Raman spectroscopy were used to determine the structural details and chemical and elemental composition of mineral sample on similar scale.

No abstract