Compared with batch systems, flowthrough and countercurrent reactors have important potential advantages for pretreating cellulosic biomass, including higher hemicellulose sugar yields, enhanced cellulose digestibility, and reduced chemical additions. Unfortunately, they suffer from high water and energy use. To better understand these trade-offs, comparative data are reported on xylan and lign...

BACKGROUND Flowthrough pretreatment is capable of removing much higher quantities of hemicellulose and lignin from lignocellulosic biomass than batch pretreatment performed at otherwise similar conditions. Comparison of these two pretreatment configurations for sugar yields and lignin removal can provide insights into lignocellulosic biomass deconstruction. Therefore, we applied liquid hot wate...

Flowthrough pretreatment with compressed-hot water can significantly increase the removal of xylan and lignin and enhance xylose sugar yields and cellulose digestibility, especially at high flow rates. However, continuous flowthrough operations that realize these benefits suffer from a large amount of water consumption that leads to high energy requirements for pretreatment and downstream proce...

Lower Red Eyes is an acid mine drainage site in Pennsylvania where low-pH Fe(II) oxidation has created a large, terraced iron mound downstream of an anoxic, acidic, metal-rich spring. Aqueous chemistry, mineral precipitates, microbial communities, and laboratory-based Fe(II) oxidation rates for this site were analyzed in the context of a depositional facies model. Depositional facies were defin...

The food source of sediment-ingesting animals is a subject of controversy, centering on the notion that the microbial biomass in sediments is insufficient to support caloric need. Gizzard shad Dorosoma cepedianum are omnivorous, sediment-ingesting fish that frequently impact the trophic structure of temperate lake and reservoir food webs. Prior gut content analyses of this fish have typically d...

The uncatalyzed hydrolysis and removal of xylan from corn stover is markedly enhanced when operation is changed from batch to continuous flowthrough conditions, and the increase in hemicellulose removal with flow rate is inconsistent with predictions by widely used first-order kinetic models. Mass transfer or other physical effects could influence the hydrolysis rate, and two models reported in...

In this data article, by using inductively coupled plasma optical spectrometry (ICP-OES), we aimed to (1) determine the concentration levels of As, Ag, Sr, Sn, Sb, and Mo in the sediments and the shells of Trachycardium lacunosum simultaneously in two separated areas (unpolluted and polluted areas) (2) comparison between the metal contents of sediments in the unpolluted and polluted areas as we...

Microbial growth within the water-saturated subsurface environment was investigated by exposing sandy sediments to groundwater for 12 weeks at a depth of 10 or 20 m in a stainless-steel groundwater well. Washing and heating the sediment to 600 degrees C (removal of organic carbon) prior to the exposure did not prevent the natural microbial community from colonizing the sterilized sediment sampl...