Production of Fermentable Sugars from Wheat Straw by Formic Acid Pretreatment

Abstract

Emerging biorefinery technologies offer a sustainable alternative through the utilisation of carbohydrates to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Cellulose molecules consist of long chains of glucose molecules as do starch molecules, but have a differentstructural configuration. These structural characteristics plus the encapsulation by lignin makes cellulosic materials more difficult to hydrolyze than starchy materials. In recent years, treatment of lignocellulosic biomass with dilute acid has been primarily used as a means of hemicellulose hydrolysis and pretreatment for enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose and a significant advancement has also been found by adding hydrochloric acid with catalyst dosage in saturated formic acid. In the present work, the hydrochloric acid concentration, temperature, the ratio of solid to liquid and reaction time were prepared for the fermentable sugars production. The obtained optimum conditions were: adding 4% hydrochloric acid in saturated formic acid solution, temperature of 105 °C, with a reaction time of 90 min, and the maximum glucose and reducing sugars production were 26.84 g/L% and 27.4%, respectively.