Abstract
Straws are agricultural residues that can be used to produce biomethane by anaerobic digestion. The methane yield of rice straw is lower than other straws. Steam explosion was investigated as a pretreatment to increase methane production. Pretreatment conditions with varying reaction times (12–30 min) and maximum temperatures (162–240 °C) were applied. The pretreated material was characterized for its composition and thermal and morphological properties. When the steam explosion was performed with a moderate severity parameter of S0 = 4.1 min, the methane yield was increased by 32% compared to untreated rice straw. This study shows that a harsher pretreatment at S0 > 4.3 min causes a drastic reduction of methane yield because inert condensation products are formed from hemicelluloses.
Highlights
Rice straw is one of the most abundant lignocellulosic agricultural residues worldwide and is produced mostly in Asia as a byproduct of rice production
Steam explosion of rice straw was performed as a pretreatment for anaerobic digestion to obtain a methane-rich biogas
Steam explosion was investigated at different reaction conditions, which
Summary
Rice straw is one of the most abundant lignocellulosic agricultural residues worldwide and is produced mostly in Asia as a byproduct of rice production. Rice was in the third place of crop production in 2013 with a world annual production of 746 million tons [1]. The production of rice straw as a byproduct can be estimated at about 1120 million tons using a straw-to-grain ratio of 1.5 [2]. Possible energetic utilization of rice straw is limited by its low bulk density, which makes large-scale, centralized conversion technologies uneconomical. Decentralized conversion routs are of special interest. One such method is anaerobic digestion of lignocellulosic biomass, which is a most efficient conversion technology regarding the energy output-to-input ratio [7,8,9]
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