Cover Picture: Fast Pyrolysis of Wood for Biofuels: Spatiotemporally Resolved Diffuse Reflectance Insitu Spectroscopy of Particles (ChemSusChem 3/2014)

The inside cover picture depicts diffuse reflectance spectroscopy of visible light and compositional characterization of terrestrial biomass during pyrolysis. Dauenhauer etal. developed this technique to address one of the major challenges of biomass pyrolysis for biofuels: the complexity of characterizing the integrated chemistries of lignocellulosic feedstocks. For over 50 years, research has focused on describing lignocellulosic conversion using multi-parameter reaction modeling, for which the number of parameters greatly exceeds the capability for experimental validation. This new technique spatiotemporally characterizes for the first time the composition of reacting particles at industrial conditions. More details can be found in the Full Paper by Dauenhauer etal. on page765 (DOI: ).