3-23: Pretreatment of biomass by proton beam irradiation

Bioethanol is one of anticipated fuels which alternate primary fossil fuel and generally produced from sugar and this sugar is from sugarcane, sugar beet, corn etc. But in these days inedible biomass such as lingo-cellulose from wood are concerned because of increase of crop price. In case of lingo-cellulose, it has not only beta (1→4) linkage of each monomer but also hydrogen bond between those polymers, then the structure is very hard and rigid to degrade into monomers. Algal biomasses also have non-degradable structure and need somewhat pretreatment. Either acid or base treatment has been used for degradation of biomass and gamma ray irradiation pretreatment was also reported.

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of proton beam pretreatment on biomasses. Concerned biomasses are red algae and cellulose from paper and the effect of each irradiation exposure time on those biomasses was observed. In this study, finally defined is a notable enhancement of the productivity of sugar through the irradiation pretreatment in comparison to non-pretreated biomass and we may expect that the irradiation pretreatment contributes to increase the bioethanol yield.