Modeling of Pretreatment Process of Lignocellulosic Biomass by Dilute Acid Hydrolysis

The most important renewable energy resources is biomass, which is one of the leading cause to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and emission of CO2. Ethanol, converted from cellulose and hemicellulose in lignocellulosic biomass by biochemical technology, has a great potential to substitute, at least partly, the conventional gasoline as transportation fuels. Hemicellulose contains abundant fermentable five carbon sugars, which can be released by thermal/chemical pre-treatment processes. The dilute acid pretreatment is a highly efficient process, which can easily hydrolyse hemicellulose to monomeric xylose to make it more sensitive to enzymatic digestion to produce ethanol. In this study, a model has been developed for the hydrolysis of hemicellulose to its xylooligomers and finally xylose using a first order reaction system. This model represents oligomers as different compounds and the effects of variation in acid content and temperature on oligomer production have been studied in this work. A comparison of optimum production of xylose from different biomass has been made in this study.