Sunday, October 17, 2010

Pretreatment: the last rice straw to knock down the camel?

As a crucial step in the biological conversion to ethanol, biomass pretreatment is often regarded as one of the main economic costs in the process,even described as the second most expensive unit cost in the conversion of lignocellulose. But what pretreatment does it refer to? Sream explosion? Dilute acid? AFEX? Lime? Hot water? organosolv? alkaline? or Ionic liquids? Why not others?

Idealy, a cost effective pretreatment should be the one that uses less chemical at low temperature with little or no inhibitory products. Is it possible? Why not?  For all the pretreatments reported, Soaking Aqueous Ammonia (SAA) is relatively a decent pretreatment method that performed at lower temperature with both glucan and xylan retained in the solids and lower amount of inhibitory compounds released form sugar degradation. After fundemental understanding of linocellulosic chemistry (rather just read the review papers), I believe that a better or improved technology can be potentially developed.

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