Indian Researchers Discover New Method to Extract More Soluble Sugars from Hemicellulose
March 1, 2017http://biofuels-news.com/display_news/11902/indian_researchers_discover_new_method_to_extract_ethanol_from_water_hyacinth/
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Hemicellulose has been mostly ignored in biofuel production as surface reactions are capable of releasing only a quarter of the soluble sugars for ethanol production. However, a research team at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IITK) has found that to quickly produce soluble sugars from hemicellulose for the bioethanol industry, one has to look at its pores.
The IITK team have found that pore-scale phenomena can be used to increase the yield of fermentable sugars and bioethanol from hemicellulose. Therefore, water hyacinth, a free-floating perennial that contains up to 50% hemicellulose, can be an attractive feedstock for biofuel production.
The average cellulose-hemicellulose ratio in plant cell walls is around 2:1, which suggests that biofuel productivity and cost-effectiveness could be boosted by more than half if the hemicellulose could be reasonably used. Simultaneous production of cellulosic and hemicellulosic fuels from the same biomass would greatly improve the combined net energy value for cellulosic ethanol.
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