Sunday, May 3, 2009
3-89
Pretreatment of Gelidium amansii for the Production of Bioethanol
Yoon-Sang Kim, Interdisciplinary Program of Graduate School for Bioenergy & Biomateraials, Chonnam Univ., Gwangju, South Korea, Suk-Won Chae, School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, Chonnam Univ., Gwangju, South Korea, Don-Hee Park, Interdisciplinary Program of Graduate School for Bioenergy and Biomaterials, School of Biological Sciences and Technology, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea, and Changshin Sunwoo, Interdisciplinary Program of Graduate School for Bioenergy and Biomaterials, Research Institute for Catalysis, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea.
There has been growing interest in an alternative feedstock for bioethanol production. Gelidium amansii, which is a red algae, is composed of carbohydrate like a cellulose. It has been, therefore, considered as a potential feedstock for bioconversion to ethanol. In this study, pretreatment using sulfuric acid was applied to this feedstock and its effectiveness on bioconversion was investigated. Galactose was removed from Gelidium amansii using sulfuric acid in a batch reactor. Optimum process conditions such as reaction temperature, reaction time, and sulfuric acid concentration were determined in terms of glucose yield after enzymatic hydrolysis. Enzyme loading was 15 FPU/g-glucan in the hydrolysis experiment. Compositional analysis was carried out by HPLC. The optimum pretreatment conditions within the scope of this study were found to be 130°C of pretreatment temperature, 10 min reaction time, and 0.4274% (w/v) of sulfuric acid concentration. At the optimum pretreatment conditions, 88.8% of ethanol yield was obtained in 72 hr.