Abstract
Cellulose hydrolysis processes using concentrated acid usually involve two steps in order to obtain high glucose yields. The first step (pre-treatment) decrystallizes cellulose while the second step (post-hydrolysis) converts the amorphous cellulose to glucose. The two-step process developed by the Industrial Research Chair on Cellulosic Ethanol and Biocommodities and its industrial partner CRB Innovations Inc., includes an intermediate partial neutralization step, whose purpose is to decrease the amount of dilution water to be added for post-hydrolysis thus minimizing handling costs. In this work, the effect of several operating parameters on the glucose yield of this process was investigated using triticale cellulose and the best conditions yielding fermentable glucose (close to 100%) were determined. These conditions involve pre-treating cellulose at 30°C using 72 wt% H2SO4 with a H2SO4/dry cellulose mass ratio of 36 over 2 h, followed by a partial neutralization using 20 wt% NaOH at an H+/OH− molar ratio of 2.3–2.5 and a post-hydrolysis at 121°C for 10 min.HIGHLIGHTS Influence of operating parameters on the glucose yield have been investigated.Conditions for producing cellulosic glucose with yields close to 100% have been identified.
Highlights
During the last two decades, there has been tremendous interest in biofuels, as a result of everincreasing worldwide energy demand and over-dependence on oil (Lee and Lavoie, 2013)
The objectives of this work are to investigate the influence of key parameters of the two-step hydrolysis process with partial neutralization on the glucose yield, and to identify the conditions resulting in the highest glucose yield
The triticale straw used in this work were the same as the one characterized by Beauchet et al (2013) in their study and were found to contain 12.4 wt% extractives, 31.7 wt% hemicelluloses, 34.0 wt% cellulose, 17.0 wt% lignin, and 4.7 wt% ashes
Summary
During the last two decades, there has been tremendous interest in biofuels, as a result of everincreasing worldwide energy demand and over-dependence on oil (Lee and Lavoie, 2013). The interest toward increasing the production of biofuels is still very strong. Since renewable fuels have a carbon balance close to neutrality (Lee and Lavoie, 2013), they are essential to mitigate the adverse climate change and global warming effects caused by greenhouse gas emissions from petroleum-derived liquid fuels. First generation liquid biofuels, produced primarily from food crops such as sugar crops, oil seeds, and cereals, represent a mature commercial technology and market, but face controversies in terms of their sustainability and potential to meet governmental targets.
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