The institute is equipped for the physical, thermochemical and enzymatic digestion of biomass and for the analysis of sugar composition of raw and pretreated biomass. In addition, the resulting degradation products can be quantified:

• For the mechanical pretreatment mills are used. For analytical purposes, an ultra-centrifugal and a ball mill are available, for method development hammer-, knife- and rotary beater mills
• For the quantitative composition analysis according to the NREL or other analytical methods, conventional HPLC and ion chromatographic methods are used. All essential carbohydrates and degradation products of biomass can be quantified.
• For biomass digestion various high-pressure autoclaves are used (laboratory scale 50 mL to 5 L; electric, hot steam and microwave heating) are used.