Kinetics of heterogeneous biomass hydrolysis by commercial cellulases: effect of biomass pretreatment

Within the framework of lignocellulose biorefinery, main issues related to the upstream processes include the drastic temperature and pressure usually required for efficient delignification of the biomass and the cost of the cellulase enzymes used to obtain monomeric sugars from cellulose hydrolysis. Several studies address the optimization of lignin removal with novel pretreatment (e.g. green solvents) with respect to the resulting sugar yields from enzymatic hydrolysis of the pretreated biomass performed at fixed conditions [1]. Among studies related to characterization of enzymatic hydrolysis, the use of semi-mechanistic models have been adopted to describe the kinetics of heterogeneous conversion of cellulose from lignocellulosic biomass into glucose [2, 3]. To investigate the effect of biomass composition resulting from different chemical and enzymatic delignification pretreatments, kinetic characterization of commercial cocktail Cellic CTec2 (Novozymes) has been carried out adopting apple industrial residues pretreated with NaOH, HCl and laccases.