Enhancement of enzymatic hydrolysis by flow through pretreatment with organosolv for corn stover

Production of fuels and chemicals from cellulosic biomass has attracted much interest in recent years. Among the unit operations, the pretreatment process to increase the enzymatic digestibility has become a key step in commercialized productions. During the last decades, many pretreatment processes have been developed for decreasing the biomass recalcitrance, but only a few of them seem to be promising.

Recently, it has been suggested an organosolv pretreatment to amendable of enzyme accessment. Compared to other chemical pretreatments, one of the main and unique advantages of organosolv process is recovery of lignin as a valuable by-product, which is relatively pure, primarily unaltered, and less condensed than Kraft lignins. Furthermore, the recovery of solvent is typically performed with minimal energy consumption. From the environmental point of view, separation of lignin as a product could reduce the problem with wastewater treatment. Moreover, enrichment of cellulose content by partial removal of lignin is a possible approach to increase the maximum obtainable glucose concentration.

The pretreatment have performed by ethanol as a organosolv. The pretreatment was conducted with flow through type reactor under the conditions of temperature, flow rate and organosolv concentration to enhancement of enzymatic hydrolysis.