Abstract
Steam explosion is the most promising technology to replace conventional acid hydrolysis of lignocellulose for biomass pretreatment. In this paper, a new screw-steam-explosive extruder was designed and explored for xylose production and lignocellulose biorefinery at the pilot scale. We investigated the effect of different chemicals on xylose yield in the screw-steam-explosive extrusion process, and the xylose production process was optimized as followings: After pre-impregnation with sulfuric acid at 80 °C for 3 h, corncob was treated at 1.55 MPa with 9 mg sulfuric acid/g dry corncob (DC) for 5.5 min, followed by countercurrent extraction (3 recycles), decoloration (activated carbon dosage 0.07 g/g sugar, 75 °C for 40 min), and ion exchange (2 batches). Using this process, 3.575 kg of crystal xylose was produced from 22 kg corncob, almost 90 % of hemicellulose was released as monomeric sugar, and only a small amount of by-products was released (formic acid, acetic acid, fural, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, and phenolic compounds were 0.17, 1.14, 0.53, 0.19, and 1.75 g/100 g DC, respectively). All results indicated that the screw-steam-explosive extrusion provides a more effective way to convert hemicellulose into xylose and could be an alternative method to traditional sulfuric acid hydrolysis process for lignocellulose biorefinery.
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Abbreviations
- SSEE:
-
Screw-steam-explosive extrusion
- DC:
-
Dry corncob
- TSAH:
-
Traditional sulfuric acid hydrolysis
- HMF:
-
Hydroxymethylfurfural
- RSM:
-
Response surface methodology
- ANOVA:
-
Analysis of variance
- CI:
-
Crystallinity index
- HPLC:
-
High-performance liquid chromatography
- FC:
-
Folin–Ciocalteu
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Acknowledgments
We are indebted to the National High-tech Research and Development Program (2012AA022303, 2014AA021906, 2014AA021903) and the National Natural Science Foundation (31170076) for their generous financial supports.
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Hong-Jia Zhang and Xiao-Guang Fan have contributed equally to this work.
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Zhang, HJ., Fan, XG., Qiu, XL. et al. A novel cleaning process for industrial production of xylose in pilot scale from corncob by using screw-steam-explosive extruder. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 37, 2425–2436 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-014-1219-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-014-1219-0