“…Others have reported alkaline decomposition kinetics of lignin model compounds (Gierer et al, 1977;Shimizu et al, 2012;Shimizu et al, 2013), although these insights are not readily extensible to real biomass, where cell wall biopolymer assemblies and tissue pore structures at the nanoscale and mesoscale, respectively, heavily influence experimental kinetic measurements (Min et al, 2014;Lima et al, 2018). Indeed, given the complexity surrounding experimental diffusion measurements (Jakes et al, 2020), few reports attempt to quantify the significant mass or heat transfer effects that accompany deacetylation of real biomass (Costanza and Costanza, 2002), especially as they apply to complicated continuous reactor configurations such as packed corn stover beds (Sahayaraj et al, 2021) or twin-screw extruders (Morales-Huerta et al, 2021). Lastly, the vast majority of these studies employ whole (unsorted) corn stover as the feedstock, despite the known structural and compositional differences among its major anatomical fractions (Min et al, 2014), which are expected to imbue unique kinetic and physical transport properties.…”