Pretreatment of Starch-Free Sugar Palm Trunk (Arenga pinnata) to Enhance Saccharification in Bioethanol Production

Abstract

Starch-Free Sugar Palm Trunk (Arenga pinnata) can be utilized to produce bioethanol because of their high lignocellulosic contents. Production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic materials consist of pre-treatment, saccharification and fermentation processes. In this work, conversion of starch-free sugar palm trunk (Arenga pinnata) to fermentable sugar and bioethanol was carried out through g pretreatment, saccharification and fermentation processes. The pretreatment was carried out by addition of 1% (v/v) HNO3 and NH4OH for 30 min and 60 min, respectively. The saccharification was carried out at enzyme celullase loadings of 10 and 20 FPU/g and substrate loadings of 10 and 20 g for NH4OH pretreated samples. Fermentation was carried out using two methods i.e. separated hydrolysis and fermentation (SHF) and simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) techniques. The results showed that pretreatment using NH4OH was more effective than HNO3 for 60 minutes. IFurthermore, the results also presented the reduction of the lignin content of 9.44% and the increase of cellulose content to 18.56% for 1% (v/v) NH4OH 60 min of pretreatment. The increase of enzyme cellulase (20 FPU/g substrate) and substrate loading (20 g) could produce more reducing sugar (17.423 g/L and 19.233 g/L) than that at 10 FPU/g substrate and 10 g substrate (11.423 g/L and 17.423 g/L), respectively. The comparison of SHF and SSF showed that SHF process yielded higher ethanol (8.11 g/L) as compared to SSF (3.95 g/L) and nontreatment process (0.507 g/L) for 72 h..