Read UA researchers fine-tune crops for biofuels, written by the Chronicle’s Paul M. Ingram and published in the Green Valley News:
“Reaching beneath the mashing gears of a sugarcane mill, Donald Slack uses a dropper to gather liquid from the hopper. He dribbles the fluid on a flashlight-like instrument with an angled head called a refractometer, and raises it to his eye like a spyglass.
He calls out a reading: “12 percent,” sighing at the result. “We’re just not getting what we expected today.”
Slack, a professor with the University of Arizona’s Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering, is referring to the amount of sugar in the extract. This measurement indicates how well the liquid being wrung from the sweet sorghum will ferment.
Under ideal conditions, half the weight of the plants will be converted into liquid, turning 2 tons of vegetation into 1,000 gallons of “juice.” On this day, however, problems with the mill are keeping the total low. In addition, the plants aren’t producing as much sugar as he hoped.” [Read more]
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Posted on January 16, 2012 by pmingram
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