Abstract
Lignocellulosic biomass is an attractive renewable resource to produce biofuel or platform chemicals. Efficient and cost-effective conversion systems of lignocellulosic biomass depend on their appropriate pretreatment processes. Alkali or dilute acid pretreatment of biomass requires a high temperature (> 150 °C) to remove xylan (hemicellulosic sugar) and lignin partially. In this study, peracetic acid was used to pretreat biomass feedstocks, including hardwood and softwood species. It was found that the thermally-assisted dilute acid pretreatment of biomass conducted under the mild temperature of 90 °C up to 5 h resulted in the effective removal of lignin from the biomass with a negligible loss of carbohydrates. This thermally-assisted pretreatment achieved 90% of delignification, and this result was compared with the microwave-assisted pretreatment method. In addition, the crystallinity index (CrI), surface morphology, and chemical structure were significantly changed after the acid pretreatment. The biomass digestibility increased significantly with increased reaction time, by 32% and 23% for hardwood and softwood, respectively. From this study, it is clear that peracetic acid pretreatment is an effective method to enrich glucan content in biomass by delignification.
Highlights
Lignocellulosic biomass is an attractive renewable resource to produce biofuel or platform chemicals
This was accomplished at a constant temperature of 90 °C and the data has been summarized in Table 1 that lead to a few significant and interesting inferences
Most of the weight loss resulting from thermally-assisted acid pretreatment can be attributed to lignin removal with only partial contributions from hemicellulosic sugar degradation for both the biomass species studied here
Summary
Lignocellulosic biomass is an attractive renewable resource to produce biofuel or platform chemicals. Alkali or dilute acid pretreatment of biomass requires a high temperature (> 150 °C) to remove xylan (hemicellulosic sugar) and lignin partially. Pretreatment is required to break the interaction of lignin seal with hemicellulose and disrupt the cellulose’s crystalline structure These pretreatment strategies include the use of mineral or organic acid, alkali, ionic liquid, steam explosion, or hydrothermal treatment[5]. Dilute acid pretreatment at high temperatures (> 150 °C) is known to be the most effective process for removing hemicellulose from biomass. Peracetic acid is a strong oxidant that can be prepared by mixing hydrogen peroxide with acetic acid in the presence of a sulphuric acid catalyst This peracetic acid is an effective pretreatment method to delignify biomass by leaving minimum lignin, which maximizes the chance of converting the cellulosic portion[10,11]. Selective delignification of biomass enhances the surface area, pore size, and porosity of the cell wall, maximizing cellulose conversion during saccharification and hydrolysis p rocess[8]
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