Utilization of palm pressed pericarp fiber: Pretreatment, optimization and characterization

Abstract

Four primary factors in controlling effectiveness of organosolvent pretreatment in lignin removal (%), cellulose retained (%), as well as hydrolysis (%) was done through a central composite design (CCD) coupled with response surface methodology (RSM). Statistically analysis predicted 54.49% of lignin removal, 86.40% of cellulose retained, and 90.67% of hydrolysis yield under numerically optimized process conditions (182.84 C, 0.61% solvent ratio, 0.69%w/w catalysts concentration, and 92.17 min reaction time). Almost reproducible results were successfully gained, suggesting feasible of design of experiment (DoE) in optimizing pressed pericarp fiber (PPF) pretreatment with nitric acid‐catalyzed ethanol solvent. Both the untreated and treated PPF were characterized by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X‐ray diffraction (XRD), and Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). It was found that the treated PPF showed a distorted surface structure (SEM), amorphous and cellulose II pattern (XRD) and bonds shrinkage for several functional groups of lignin and hemicellulose while bands expanded for functional groups of cellulose (FTIR). © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 33: 238–249, 2014