Pretreatments play a pivotal role in valorizing biomass in order to break down its recalcitrant composite structure that protects the plant from the environment. The objective of this is to collect value-added fractions such as cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin rich fractions for further processing to e.g. biofuels or other valuable materials or chemicals. Currently, Kraft process is by far the most dominant process for valorizing many wood species, such as pine, birch and spruce. Kraft process, however, requires immense initial investments and becomes an extremely complex industrial process with more than hundred years of technological and methodological development accompanied to it. Therefore there are industrial prospects in processing more easily yielding woods (e.g. aspen) and waste crop species (e.g. wheat straw) with simpler processing methods which avoid most of the difficult and costly chemical circulation while still providing comparable pulping results.<br/>Herein, we compared some of the recently developed forthright pulping methods such as alkaline organosolv, formic acid organosolv, ionic liquid processes and compare those to a simple soda cooking. We particularly examined the effect of a brief hot water pretreatment to extract most of the hemicelluloses to facilitate the actual cooking. We utilized a microwave reactor for rapid heat transfer and convenient control of temperature and pressure. The bottom line in this research is to provide new detailed information of the products that can be obtained <i>via</i> these processes and discuss their potential in a modern biorefinery. In fact, most of these processes can produce high quality lignin which can be potentially valorized further much easier than Kraft lignin. This is a huge potential to create new routes to gather larger income from the process products and hence to make the process sustainable and economically viable.<br/>

Effect of hot water pretreatment in simple pulping utilizing a laboratory scale microwave reactor

255th National Meeting (2018)

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