Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-14-2019
Department
Department of Chemical Engineering
Abstract
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) offers substantial potential as a feedstock for the production of sugar-derived biofuels and biochemical products from cell wall polysaccharides (i. e., cellulose and hemicelluloses) and water-extractable sugars (i.e., glucose, fructose, sucrose, and starch). A number of preprocessing schemes can be envisioned that involve processes such as sugar extraction, pretreatment, and densification that could be employed in decentralized, regional-scale biomass processing depots. In this work, an energy sorghum exhibiting a combination of high biomass productivity and high sugar accumulation was evaluated for its potential for integration into several potential biomass preprocessing schemes. This included counter-current extraction of water-soluble sugars followed by mild NaOH or liquid hot water pretreatment of the extracted bagasse. A novel processing scheme was investigated that could integrate with current diffuser-type extraction systems for sugar extraction. In this approach, mild NaOH pretreatment (i.e., <90°C) was performed as a counter-current extraction to yield both an extracted, pretreated bagasse and a high-concentration mixed sugar stream. Following hydrolysis of the bagasse, the combined hydrolysates derived from cellulosic sugars and extractable sugars were demonstrated to be fermentable to high ethanol titers (>8%) at high metabolic yields without detoxification using a Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain metabolically engineered and evolved to ferment xylose.
Publication Title
Frontiers in Energy Research
Recommended Citation
Williams, D. L.,
Ong, R.,
Mullet, J. E.,
&
Hodge, D. B.
(2019).
Integration of Pretreatment With Simultaneous Counter-Current Extraction of Energy Sorghum for High-Titer Mixed Sugar Production.
Frontiers in Energy Research,
6.
http://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2018.00133
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/15773
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2019 Williams, Ong, Mullet and Hodge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.