Improving Saccharification of Oil Palm Shell by Acetic Acid Pretreatment for Biofuel Production

Lignocellulosic biomass is utilized as raw materials for biofuel and electricity production in different ways. The major bottleneck of biofuel production from lignocellulosic biomass is the saccharification to produce small molecules of sugars that subsequently converted to value added compounds. Pretreatment is performed before saccharification to enhance conversion rate. In this study, acetic acid was selected to pretreat oil palm shell to enhance the production of reducing sugars in enzymatic saccharification reaction. To obtain the maximum sugars, Response Surface Methodology (RSM) with Box-Behnken design was applied in the pretreatment. Three variable factors, including reaction time, reaction temperature and acetic acid concentration were varied with three levels. The generated model has high correlation coefficient (R2) at 0.9725 indicating the high confident level. Based on the model, the maximum reducing sugars at 40.408 mg/g-biomass could be obtained at optimum condition (107.30 oC reaction temperature, 30 min reaction time and 8.24% acid concentration). The results of this study suggested the benefit of using acetic acid for improvement of saccharification of lignocellulosic biomass to biofuel.