OPTIMIZATION OF THE PRETREATMENT OF PROSOPIS NIGRA SAWDUST FOR THE PRODUCTION OF FERMENTABLE SUGARS

DAGNINO, E. P.; CHAMORRO, E. R.; ROMANO, S. D.; FELISSIA, F. E.; AREA, M. C.

BIORESOURCES

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV DEPT WOOD & PAPER SCI

Lugar: Raleigh; Año: 2013 vol. 8 p. 499 - 514

1930-2126

The black carob tree (Prosopis nigra) is a wooden species par excellence in Chaco, Argentina. The possibility of finding a use for the sawdust, the main residue of industrialization of the wood, can be useful as a model to complete a cluster within the furniture industry of any country in the tropics applying the biorefinery concept. To obtain the conversion of wood carbohydrates in bioethanol it is necessary a pretreatment stage. The objective of this work was to find the best acid pretreatment conditions to maximize the extraction of xylose with minimum degradation, maximizing the concentration of glucans in the pretreated solid, to obtain a bigger enzymatic accessibility using black carob tree sawdust as raw material. The optimization was carried out by a Central Composite Design (CCD) with two independent variables: the concentration of the sulfuric acid solution and the heating time. The optimum was obtained at the mean values of the tested acid solution concentration (1.2%) and shorter heating times (10.2min). The performance of the enzymatic hydrolysis of the pretreated solid over a period of 72h of reaction was 3 times higher than the untreated solid.