Enhancing cellulose extraction from palm fronds using acidic and alkaline pretreatment: a kinetic study

The present study employed alkali and acidic pretreatment methods to extract cellulose fibers from palm frond biomass. Also, the TGA is employed to quantify the proportions of the primary constituents: hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin. Each of these components decomposes at a characteristic temperature, allowing for an estimation of their percentages in the sample. Three first-order independent parallel reactions were predicted having hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin as the major constituents while multi-component kinetic modeling was applied to compute the kinetic parameters of each component, activation energy, and pre-exponential factor, at each peak temperature. As a result, One-dimensional Diffusion (D1) was found to be the best-representing TGA of the palm frond biomass decomposition. The compositions of palm frond waste were 31, 30.65, and 37.71% of hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin. The obtained activation energies of the hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin were 75.98, 77.25, and 130.27 kJ/mol. Acid and alkali pretreatment was utilized to increase the cellulose content in biomass but the alkaline treatments generally yielded higher cellulose contents with less degradation compared to acidic treatments.

Graphical abstract