Improvement of sugar yield from alkaline pretreated herbaceous and woody lignocellulosic biomass through visible light illumination in the presence of silicon

Abstract

For the sustainable development of our society, much attention has been paid to biorefinery, where renewable lignocellulosic biomass is converted valuable chemicals and/or fuels. Alkakaline pretreatment before the enzymatic saccharification of the lignocellulosic biomass has been examined for a long time but further improvement is required to obtaina high yield of sugars. We have tried to improve the sugar yield using two different typelignocelluloses such as herbaceous napiergrass leaves and woody kudzu stalks. The trials to improve the sugar yields from the alkaline pretreated these lignocelluloses have been examined by supplementary subjecting to visible light illumination in the presence of Si.The yield of reducing sugars from herbaceous napiergrass leaves was improved from 60.3 to86.7% by using the complemental illumination with Si after the enzymatic saccharificationfor 24 h. In the case of kudzu stalks, that was improved from 57.4 to 88.6% with the sametreatment.