There is an increasing interest in bioethanol production from wood-based feedstock due to its consistent quality, access to year-round harvesting and the lack of competition with food production. Ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass involves several steps, where the pretreatment is considered the most critical one. The objective of the pretreatment is to create a reactive substrate for enzymatic hydrolysis. In this work a factorial design was used to evaluate the combination of two pretreatments, steam explosion and an advance treatment to determine their effectiveness on two wood species, pine and birch. Chemical analyses are performed on the pretreated materials to determine the effect of the pretreatment severity on wood composition and reactivity. The pretreated biomass was then subjected to enzymatic hydrolysis. The results show that the combination of the two pretreatments modifies the substrate and enhance enzyme reactivity. For birch samples treated with only steam explosion the sugar conversion reaches 62% of the initial carbohydrate content in wood, and for one of the conditions when the advance treatment is used prior to steam explosion at the same severity 92% of sugar conversion was obtained, up to 30 % improvement, which should provide higher ethanol yields. This work also showed that the hardwood (birch) was much easier to pretreat than the softwood (pine), where the maximum sugar recovery was only 18%.

Combination of two pretreatment techniques and subsequent enhancement of enzymatic hydrolysis for bioethanol production

247th National Meeting (2014)

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