Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Exhibit Hall
One of the key reward in the hydrothermal (HP) and H2SO4-catalyzed hydrothermal (CHP) pretreatments of lignocellulosic biomass (i.e., sugarcane bagasse) is an eco-friendly process and weak acid process, respectively. In this sense, the effects of different routes and conditions on the components of biomass (cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin) are investigated with a focus on high-solids loading and how the catalyzed treatment substantially enhances the pretreatment to remove both, compositional and structural barriers of lignocellulosic biomass. In this work, a comprehensive kinetic modeling of global rates (Lavarack et al., 2002) was used to obtain guidelines for improving the processes efficiencies to pretreat sugarcane bagasse. Experimental trials had as goal to evaluate the influence of several conditions in respect to acid concentration (1-3%), solid content (10-25%) and treatment time (0-840 min for HP and 0-150 min for CHP) at 121 °C. Evaluation criteria for analyses were based on high xylose yield and low inhibitors content in the liquid fraction and high cellulose recovery from the solid fraction obtained of whole pretreated materials. Results showed, that between 60-120 min, it is reached a high efficient reaction conversion with low loss of the cellulose (around 15%) and low concentrations of hemicelluloses in cellolignin material (less than 10%) using high-solids loading (20-25%) after the H2SO4-catalyzed hydrothermal pretreatment. Furfural and hydroxymethylfurfural concentrations were lower than 2.0 g/L, which it is considered acceptable since it is below the concentration that is expected to be inhibitory to a fermentation process.