Assessment on Temperature-Pressure Severally Controlled Explosion Pretreatment of Poplar

Abstract In this work, temperature-pressure severally controlled explosion pretreatment (TPE) was proposed to pretreat poplar chips to improve the cellulase hydrolysis yield. In TPE process, native poplar chips (NP) were mixed with steam and N2 under pressure of 2.6, 2.8 and 3.0 MPa at 209 °C for 7 min. Meanwhile, steam explosion (SE) was also used to pretreat poplar chips for comparison at 209 °C (1.9 MPa) for 7 min. Results showed that the contents of hemicellulose and lignin were decreased from 19.4% to 4.6% and from 27.8% to 19.5% with increasing pressure, respectively. For cellulase hydrolysis process, TPE was more advantageous than SE due to lower contents of hemicellulose and lignin, resulting in a higher cellulose conversion (40.7%) in relation to SE sample (34.9%). The Langmuir isothermal- type equation expressed the factors related to the hydrolysis capacity, and the results showed that this model can well describe the kinetics of the enzymatic hydrolysis.