Enzymatic hydrolysis of non-treated sugarcane bagasse using pressurized liquefied petroleum gas with and without ultrasound assistance

In this work the enzymatic hydrolysis of sugarcane bagasse using pressurized liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and ultrasound assisted pressurized LPG (US assisted-LPG) to obtain fermentable sugar in a unique step was investigated. For this purpose, non-treated sugarcane bagasse was used for enzymatic hydrolysis in a fixed-bed bioreactor. Several experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of moisture content, enzyme load and pressure on the yield of fermentable sugar after the hydrolysis. Maximum yield of fermentable sugar for hydrolysis carried out using pressurized LPG and US assisted-LPG was 245 and 217 g kg−1, respectively. The main contribution of this work was to demonstrate that the use of alternative technologies (US assisted-LPG) has the potential to increase the efficiency of enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic materials without the needs of hard pre-treatment of the material and high enzyme loading.