Biobutanol production from sugarcane bagasse and banana pseudostem

Abstract

Biofuels are expected to play a larger role in ensuring future energy security by reducing the fossil fuel dependency and mitigating climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. Biobutanol is a next generation biofuel and an attractive energy substitute. In recent years, butanol has received significant research attention as a second-generation biofuel. It has significant advantages like higher calorific value, low vapour pressure, lower miscibility with water and it is less corrosive than ethanol. Biobutanol can be produced from lignocellulosic wastes generated by the agriculture and forestry. Bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass to butanol involves pretreatment which alters the structure and chemical composition to ease efficient hydrolysis, converting the polysaccharide to fermentable monosaccharide newlinesugars by hydrolysis and fermentation of sugars to biobutanol. This study focuses on less energy intensive pretreatment methods for the production of fermentable sugars from Sugarcane Bagasse (SCB) and Banana Pseudostem (BPS) and production of biobutanol from those sugars. The influence of hydrothermal and alkali pretreatment with and without additional thermal treatment were studied in detail. newline newline