Biorefinery applications gather several important and very diverse fields of research: biofuels production, process engineering, biotechnology, agronomy, and environmental impact assessment, among others. The highly interdisciplinary dimension of the biorefinery concept makes it extremely difficult to have an overview of the research activities in this field. Moreover, the diversity of pretreatment, conversion, and separation processes available to transform biomass into added-value chemicals and biofuels becomes more and more important. Furthermore, there is an important lack of tools and actors to build the necessary interface between research laboratories and industries (chemical industries, forestry industries, and food industries). This creates the risk of seeing the biomass resource used only for easy and cheap applications like heating, missing the opportunities of a more valuable use of this limited resource. In this fertile research area, we welcome original research papers and review articles for this special issue.

This special issue will focus on the design and development of integrated facilities producing multiple products from biomass. The potential of the use a mix of biomass feedstocks to yield a wide variety of products by employing a combination of technologies (e.g., chemical and/or biological transformations, extractions, and separations) in integrated biorefineries will be discussed. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Extraction of valuable secondary metabolites from agricultural (sugarcane bagasse, corn stover, rice straw, etc.) and marine (microalgae) biomasses
• Production of valuable coproducts in biorefineries including chemicals, energy, and materials (nanowhiskers, etc.)
• Nontraditional methods of biomass processing based on green technologies: microwave, ultrasound, sub/supercritical fluids, ionic liquids, and so on
• Design of future biorefineries using nontraditional biomasses
• Catalysis and catalytic processes in biorefinery
• Reactor types, modeling, and design of multiphase reactors for bioconversion
• Process intensification in biorefineries
• Process simulation, integration, modeling, and optimization techniques applied for biomass valorization
• Environmental sustainability and economic analysis of emerging bioproducts production processes

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijce/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ijce/resu/ according to the following timetable: