Tuesday, April 20, 2010
LL Conference Facility (Hilton Clearwater Beach)
The Sugarcane bagasse pretreatments are physical and chemical process that reduce the crystallinity, disrupt the hydrogen bonding of cellulose to more accessibility to hydrolytic depolymerization reactions. This study presents the evaluation of the cleavage of polysaccharides from sugarcane bagasse using ionizing radiation as a pretreatment to enzymatic or chemical hydrolysis of cellulose. Samples of sugarcane bagasse were irradiated using Radiation Dynamics Electron Beam Accelerator with 1.5 MeV energy and 37 kW, in batch systems with various absorbed doses. The modifications on the fibber structure and the effects on polysaccharides composition in absorbed doses from 5 to 150 kGy are presented and discussed. The total reduction of high molecular weight polysasharides with 60 kGy showed that the ionizing radiation processing can cleavage the cellulose and hemicelluloses without losing the sugars and destroying the lignin, and these are desirable effects in the pretreatments processes.