Organizations: NSERC; Canada Foundation for Innovation; Canada Research Chairs; Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation
Autohydrolysis is vastly used in industry to extract hemicellulose from lignocellulosic biomass. Despite their potential end-use applications, lignocelluloses cannot be completely extracted from hydrolysate as they may deposit on the equipment during the hydrolysis process. This study tends to investigate the physicochemical properties and adsorption behavior of the components of hydrolysates produced via the autohydrolysis process. In this work, the autohydrolysis of softwood was conducted under different conditions to produce hydrolysates with different lignin and hemicellulose contents. The results provided evidence for the aggregation of lignocelluloses under acidic conditions in hydrolysates. The hydrolysate with a higher concentration of lignin and hemicelluloses (sample 2) had a larger hydrodynamic size (98.5 nm), and the size decreased to 4 nm in the presence of 40 mM KCl. In the salty system, maintaining the hydrolysate unagitated for 4 h increased the hydrodynamic size of the hydrolysate components to 12 nm. Furthermore, the deposition of lignocelluloses on stainless steel surface was studied using Quartz crystal microbalance in hydrogen chloride and acetic acid buffer solutions. The results confirmed that sample 2 possessed a higher affinity for adsorption 3400 x 10(-8) kg/m(2) than sample 1 did (1290 x 10(-8) kg/m(2)) on the stainless-steel surface. The image analysis indirectly confirmed the formation of agglomerates in hydrolysate and their deposition on the stainless-steel surface. The reversibility of lignocellulose deposition depicts the weak interaction between the dissolved lignocelluloses and stainless-steel surfaces.
