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A novel cleaning process for industrial production of xylose in pilot scale from corncob by using screw-steam-explosive extruder

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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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Correspondence to Wen-Ya Wang or Qi-Peng Yuan.

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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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