earticle

영어

Bioethanol researches can solve the problem of fossil fuels such as environment pollution and the limitation of fossil fuels. Nowadays, lignocellulosic biomass is regarded as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels. Corn stover, rice straw, switch grass and Miscanthus have been evaluated extensively as renewable biomass substrate for making ethanol. Especially, Miscanthus is considered as one of the best feedstocks for the bioethanol production because of the high carbohydrate content and the high annual biomass yield. In this study, Miscanthus was selected as the lignocellulosic feedstock for the bioethanol production and pretreated by the extrusion process using twin screw which is suitable for applying the continuous and large scale process. A central composite design of response surface method was used to optimize the condition of pretreatment, in respect to treatment temperature, sodium hydroxide concentration, twin screw speed and flow rate. The optimal conditions were found to be 78.53℃, 0.81 M, 112.67 rpm and 97.44 mL/min for temperature, NaOH concentration, twin screw speed and flow rate, respectively. Finally, 83.39% of theoretical total glucose conversion rate (TGCR) yielded after pretreatment using extrusion facility. This result constitutes a significant contribution to the continuous process of bioethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass.