Heavy usage of gasoline, burgeoning fuel prices, and environmental issues have paved the way for the exploration of cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol production technologies are emerging and require continued technological advancements. One of the most challenging issues is the pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass for the desired sugars yields after enzymatic hydrolysis. We hypothesized that consecutive dilute sulfuric acid-dilute sodium hydroxide pretreatment would overcome the native recalcitrance of sugarcane bagasse (SB) by enhancing cellulase accessibility of the embedded cellulosic microfibrils.

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We perform fully relativistic band-structure calculations for cubic SrTiO3, which are used to obtain carrier effective masses and the frequency behavior of its complex dielectric function ε(ω). The obtained values and anisotropy of the carrier effective masses are shown to be highly influenced by the relativistic contributions. In order to evaluate the static dielectric constant, the low-frequency behavior of ε(ω) is obtained by taking into account also the optical phonon contributions to the imaginary part of ε(ω), adopting a simplified classical oscillator dispersion model. It is found that the phonon contribution leads to about 240 times (at T=85 K) the value of the bare electronic contribution to the dielectric constant. The calculated temperature dependence of the dielectric constant is shown to be consistent with that observed in bulk SrTiO3 static permittivity measurements.