Enzymatic digestion of corn stover and poplar wood after pretreatment by leading technologies
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Pretreatment operations are essential to high yields for biological processing of cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals that would open up major new agricultural markets with powerful societal benefits and have a major impact on costs. A team of researchers experienced with cellulosic biomass hydrolysis formed a Biomass Refining Consortium for Applied Fundamentals and Innovation to develop comparative data on the more promising pretreatment options for the first time. Pretreatment by ammonia explosion, aqueous ammonia recycle, controlled pH, dilute acid, flowthrough, lime, and sulfur dioxide steam explosion are applied to single sources of corn stover and poplar wood, and comparative data are developed on the digestibility of cellulose in the pretreated solids using a controlled source of enzyme. Most of the glucan in corn stover was solubilized in the enzymatic digestion step at cellulose enzyme loadings of 60 and 15 FPU/g glucan for each pretreatment, demonstrating that all are effective in making corn stover cellulose accessible to enzymes. Although most of the xylose was released during pretreatment for dilute acid, flowthrough, partial flow, and controlled pH pretreatments, the cellulose formulation used was effective in releasing residual xylose for the solids from all pretreatments. The high-pH pretreatments of AFEX, ARP, and lime particularly benefited from this xylanase activity in that 50% was solubilized by enzymes for ARP, two thirds for lime, and essentially all for AFEX. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting and Fall Showcase (Cincinnati, OH 10/30/2005-11/4/2005).
