Abstract
Background:
Mineral elements present in lignocellulosic biomass feedstocks may accumulate in biorefinery process
streams and cause technological problems, or alternatively can be reaped for value addition. A better understanding of
the distribution of minerals in biomass in response to pretreatment factors is therefore important in relation to
development of new biorefinery processes. The objective of the present study was to examine the levels of mineral
elements in pretreated wheat straw in response to systematic variations in the hydrothermal pretreatment parameters
(pH, temperature, and treatment time), and to assess whether it is possible to model mineral levels in the pretreated
fiber fraction.
Results:
Principal component analysis of the wheat straw biomass constituents, including mineral elements, showed
that the recovered levels of wheat straw constituents after different hydrothermal pretreatments could be divided into
two groups: 1) Phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, manganese, zinc, and calcium correlated with xylose and arabinose
(that is, hemicellulose), and levels of these constituents present in the fiber fraction after pretreatment varied
depending on the pretreatment-severity; and 2) Silicon, iron, copper, aluminum correlated with lignin and cellulose
levels, but the levels of these constituents showed no severity-dependent trends. For the first group, an expanded
pretreatment-severity equation, containing a specific factor for each constituent, accounting for variability due to
pretreatment pH, was developed. Using this equation, the mineral levels could be predicted with R
2
> 0.75; for some
with R
2
up to 0.96.
Conclusion:
Pretreatment conditions, especially pH, significantly influenced the levels of phosphorus, magnesium,
potassium, manganese, zinc, and calcium in the resulting fiber fractions. A new expanded pretreatment-severity
equation is proposed to model and predict mineral composition in pretreated wheat straw biomass
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Biotechnology for Biofuels |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 141 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| ISSN | 1754-6834 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Bibliographical note
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Keywords
- Hydrothermal pretreatment
- Lignocellulose
- pH
- Minerals
- Severity modeling