Effect of sodium hydroxide pretreatment on chemical composition of treated acacia mangium using response surface methodology

Abstract

High cellulose biomass is required to produce high yield fermentable sugars to be used as a feedstock for biofuels production. However, the higher lignin content in biomass becomes a hindrance to a high cellulose content biomass raw material production. Therefore, an alkaline pretreatment optimised with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is necessary to remove lignin. In this study, the optimisation was carried out using response surface methodology and the parameters were set at a temperature range of 70-100 °C, the reaction time of 1-3 hours and NaOH concentration between 1-10% w/v. The samples were analysed to obtain its chemical composition and compared with untreated Acacia mangium. Optimised conditions were achieved at 70 °C (temperature), 3 hours (reaction time) and 5.50% w/v (NaOH concentration) with optimized cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin removal content of 47.66, 36.16 and 12.66% and standard error of 7.90, 1.87 and 3.24% respectively. In the study, the cellulose content obtained from the NaOH treated A. mangium had risen to about 20.40% and had high potential to be used as a feedstock for the production of fermentable sugars.