(671b) Recovery of Fermentable Sugars and Pretreatment of Corn Stover By Flow-Through Reactor System

Corn stover, which contains considerable amount of sucrose, was treated using a flow-through column reactor system. A multi-stage fractionation and pretreatment reaction was performed to fractionate sucrose and/or hemicellulose in the first stage, and to pretreat the remaining solids in the second stage. In this process, hot-water was introduced into the biomass-packed column reactor; effective recovery of sucrose was achieved with low-temperature treatment in the first stage (60-130°C), which was followed by the second stage pretreatment at higher temperature (150-200°C). Liquid hydrolyzate obtained from the first-stage treatment, which is rich in sucrose, can be directly used by the fermenting microbes. The remaining solids after pretreatment can be hydrolyzed by enzymes, and then fermented into ethanol. During the second-stage pretreatment at high temperature, acetyl group and other organic acid are released by cleavage of hemicellulose, which results in autohydrolysis and catalytic reaction of biomass.

In this study, various pretreatment conditions (1) for effective fractionation of sucrose and hemicellulose and (2) for effective pretreatment of remaining solids using flow-through reactor system were explored. Chemical compositions, enzymatic digestibility, and fermentability of treated samples will be reported in this paper.