341 / 2018-07-31 10:39:56

Valorizing waste furniture board through bioethanol production in a water-based biorefinery

全体主题 > 生物质液体燃料

With the fast urbanization and improvement of people’s living standards, an increasing number of furniture was used and disposed, 85% of which is produced from lignocellulosic biomass based synthetic board. Prevalent disposal method of these used/waste board furniture is landfill or incineration, which not only causes potential soil/air pollution, but also wastes the natural lignocellulosic biomass resources. This work shows a possible way to valorize waste furniture board through bioethanol production in a water-based biorefinery. Three representative furniture board substrates including fiber board, chip board and wood board were selected as the testing substrates while prevalent liquid hot water pretreatment was selected as the demonstrating pretreatment method due to its low-cost and mild operating conditions. Variables including pretreatment time and temperature were optimized to recover hemicellulose fraction while facilitating the subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose fraction. The physical and chemical structural changes of the pretreated substrates were assessed by using compositional analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffractometry (XRD) and confocal microscopy etc., while their enzymatic accessibility was assessed by prevalent Simon staining and water retention value techniques. Our initial results showed that a good compromise between hemicellulose recovery and cellulose accessibility could be achieved at the optimized conditions of 180 °C and 30 min. Cellulose hydrolysis was greatly enhanced among all these three substrates, which benefitted the subsequent fermentation process for bioethanol production especially at relatively high solid loadings.