Ionic Liquids: Green Solvent for Biomass Pretreatment

Abstract

Biomass feedstocks are considered as world’s biggest renewable chemicals and energy source that need to be utilized in order to meet global demands. Various researchers have compared pretreatment technologies available to make use of biomass materials; however, none could have been appeared as absolutely environmentally friendly. The growing research towards pretreatment methods led to the use of ionic liquids in this regard that opened a new horizon towards green solutions for the modern world’s chemical and energy requirements. A simple search with “Ionic Liquids AND Biomass” provided 450 links of articles on Pubmed while the same showed 239,000 results on google scholar, indicating recent trend towards this growing area of biomass research. Ionic liquids are reportedly effective and innovative chemical for pretreating biomass because they bring about a noticeable structural change in biomass. This review encompasses brief discussion related to general features of Ionic liquids and their various applications in the fields other than biomass pretreatment. The aspects related to biomass pretreatment have been covered at length particularly for sugarcane bagasse.