Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Biomass recalcitrance is considered as the main hurdle to low cost conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels, making overcoming recalcitrance essential to economically feasible and environmentally sustainable biomass conversion. Various factors are considered as contributing to biomass recalcitrance, such as hemicellulose in terms of the intricate carbohydrate-lignin network surrounding the cellulose microfibrils and restricting access by enzymes. Dilute acid pretreatment has shown excellent promise in removing hemicelluloses. However, conditions that maximize individual sugar yields do not usually occur at the same pretreatment conditions as those that maximize total sugar yields from both pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis. Herein, a high-throughput pretreatment and co-hydrolysis system (HTPH) was extended to low pH operation and applied to collect large amounts of data from various combinations of two-stage pretreatment and co-hydrolysis conditions in order to further understand how hemicelluloses affects biomass recalcitrance and digestibility.