Abstract
Pretreatment of cellulosic biomass is necessary before enzymatic saccharification and fermentation. Extrusion is a well established process in food industries and it can be used as a physicochemical treatment method for cellulosic biomass. Aqueous ammonia soaking treatment at mild temperatures ranging from 60 to $80^{\circ}C$ for longer reaction times has been used to preserve most of the cellulose and hemicellulose in the biomass. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of extrusion treatment on aqueous ammonia soaking method. Extrusion was performed with miscanthus sample conditioned to 2mm of particle size and 20% of moisture content at $200^{\circ}C$ of barrel temperature and 175rpm of screw speed. And then aqueous ammonia soaking was performed with 15%(w/w) ammonia solution at $60^{\circ}C$ for 1, 2, 4, 8, 12 hours on the extruded and raw miscanthus samples respectively. In the combined extrusion-soaking treatment, most compositions removal occurred within 1~2 hours and on a basis of 1 hour soaking treatment values, cellulose was recovered about 85% and other compositions, including hemicellulose, are removed about 50% from extruded miscanthus sample. The combined extrusion-soaking treated and soaking only treated samples were subjected to enzymatic hydrolysis using cellulase and ${\beta}$-glucosidase. The enzymatic digestibility value of combined extrusion-2 hours soaking treated sample was comparable to 12 hours soaking only treated sample. It means that extrusion treatment can shorten the conventional long reaction time of aqueous ammonia soaking. The findings suggest that the combination of extrusion and soaking is a promising pretreatment method to solve both problems for no lignin removal of extrusion and long reaction time of aqueous ammonia soaking.
