2013 Volume 67 Issue 4 Pages 364-368
When we get lack of energy, as the energy demand grows, there comes the time to research biomass energy. But the enthusiastic researches fade away, sooner the oil price gets down to be stable. It has been 20 years since they started research sweet sorghum as a bio-fuel at Ibaraki University. To make bio-fuel, sugar is extracted from sweet sorghum and fermented to be ethanol. They actually made success to run automobiles with the bio-fuel. It is a great progress. Here we suggest another point of view for sweet sorghum, to make pulp from the residue of bio-fuel. There remains a lot of cellulose after sugar extraction in the sweet sorghum. We found that it is possible to make pulp from the residue of sweet sorghum, and furthermore the strength of pulp is stronger than that of LBKP. We finally produced envelopes available for general use, enhanced the value to the residue of bio-fuel. Since it is true that it costs a lot to make pulp from the residue, reduction of pulping cost is the first problem to solve. Anyway, it is significant to contribute to study the biomass, not only for bio-fuel but for the residue to reduce waste or costs.
