Datasets on the production routes and the properties of plant powders for manufacturing of green products.

ABSTRACT

The diversity of the plant biomass available on earth makes plants an exceptional resource for replacing fossil resources in green chemistry, bioenergy and biobased materials. For numerous applications, and especially the high-tech ones (building block molecules, high-power bioenergy, additive manufacturing of biobased materials), the macrostructure assemblies of the plant biomass often need to be first broken down into a fine powder. This can be achieved by dry fractionation process combining comminution and sorting steps. The chemical and physical properties of the ground plant powder results both from the process conditions, the histological structure and chemical composition of the raw plant materials. In a forward engineering approach, the quality of the final products can be highly improved by the selection of the right powder (raw materials and production process) for the right application. This article provides production routes together with physical and chemical characterization of 10 biomass powders from 6 different biomass feedstocks (SP - spirulina, HI - hibiscus, PB - pine bark, HC - hemp Core, RH - rice husk and RHA - rice husk ash). These feedstocks represent a broad range of raw materials properties. For pine bark, hemp core, rice husk and rice husk ash, two grades of powders related to two different particle sizes were produced by two different routes to highlight the impact of the comminution process on the powder properties. The devices used and the process parameters are described. The morphological properties of the powder were quantified using laser diffraction (particle size) and image analysis (shape factor) and qualitatively analyzed with SEM. The specific surface area was determined using gas sorption with BET theory, and the hygroscopic properties were measured using direct vapor sorption. The chemical characterizations were determined with a set of biochemical assays and, complementary, FTIR and fluorescence spectra were recorded to provide fingerprints of samples. The dataset includes tables that summarize the main characteristic descriptors of each analysis as well as the raw data. The data are registered in the French Research Data Gouv public repository and also stored in the PO2 BaGaTel database using the PO2/TransformON ontology [1]. SPO2Q web tool allows on line querying of the database, which can also be consulted using PO2 manager desktop application [[1], [2], [3]].