Abstract:In this study, the chemical pretreatment method using ethanol organosolv with hydrogen peroxide was investigated to improve enzymatic saccharification of corn stover. The pretreatment method using ethanol with hydrogen peroxide in a flow-through reaction was proposed to lower the reaction severity such as the pretreatment temperature. With the same reaction time, the pretreatment process using organosolv (30 wt.% ethanol) containing 1 wt.% hydrogen peroxide at 150 • C resulted in a similar conversion yield as the result of the alkali pretreatment method using 15 wt.% aqueous ammonia at 170 • C. When corn stover was pretreated with 30 wt.% ethanol solution containing 5 wt.% hydrogen peroxide, a glucose conversion yield of 69.7 wt.% and glucose production of 23.8 g were achieved.
In this study, the optimum conditions for pretreatment of corn stover using organosolv were determined. The predicted optimum conditions, determined using the response surface methodology, were ethanol concentration of 56.6 wt %, reaction temperature of 187.5 • C, and 320 mL of liquid throughput. Moreover, the pretreatment using recycled organosolv was carried out under the predicted optimum conditions. The pretreatment effect of the organosolv decreased as the organosolv was reused in the pretreatment process. When performing pretreatment with the initial organosolv, enzymatic digestibility for glucan was 71.0%. The digestibility was reduced as low as less than 66% in the first reuse process. Nevertheless, when repeatedly reusing the organosolv, the glucan digestibility remained mostly stable. It was confirmed that organosolv can be reused in the flow-through pretreatment of corn stover.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.