Hydrodynamic cavitation for lignocellulosic biomass pretreatment: a review of recent developments and future perspectives.

The hydrodynamic cavitation comes out as a promising route to lignocellulosic biomass pretreatment releasing huge amounts of energy and inducing physical and chemical transformations, which favor lignin-carbohydrate matrix disruption. The hydrodynamic cavitation process combined with other pretreatment processes has shown an attractive alternative with high pretreatment efficiency, low energy consumption, and easy setup for large-scale applications compared to conventional pretreatment methods. This present review includes an overview of this promising technology and a detailed discussion on the process of parameters that affect the phenomena and future perspectives of development of this area.

Theoretical modeling and experimental validation of hydrodynamic cavitation reactor with a Venturi tube for sugarcane bagasse pretreatment.

A hydrodynamic cavitation reactor with a Venturi tube was modeled through a computational fluid dynamics approach in order to evaluate the influence of pressure ratio, diameter and length of the throat zone. A cavitation reactor equipped with a Venturi tube was built in accordance with the computational modeling results. Hydrodynamic cavitation assisted alkaline pretreatment was performed to evaluate the influence of NaOH concentration (1-5%), the weight to volume percentage of solid in liquid (1-5%) and the reaction time (20-60 min.