Acid-catalyzed autohydrolysis of wheat straw to improve sugar recovery.

A comparison study of autohydrolysis and acid-catalyzed autohydrolysis of wheat straw was performed to understand the impact of acid addition on overall sugar recovery. Autohydrolysis combined with refining is capable of achieving sugar recoveries in the mid 70s. If the addition of a small amount of acid is capable of increasing the sugar recovery even higher it may be economically attractive.

Enzymatic hydrolysis of autohydrolyzed wheat straw followed by refining to produce fermentable sugars.

Wheat straw was pretreated using an autohydrolysis process with different temperatures (160-200 °C) and times (10-20 min) in order to allow the recovery of hemicellulose in the filtrate and help open up the structure of the biomass for improved accessibility of enzymes during enzymatic hydrolysis. Autohydrolysis at 190 °C for 10 min provided the highest overall sugar (12.2/100g raw wheat straw) in the autohydrolysis filtrate and recovered 62.

Removal of methylene blue from aqueous solution using cotton stalk, cotton waste and cotton dust.

In this study, cotton stalk (CS), cotton waste (CW) and cotton dust (CD) was used as sorbents to remove methylene blue (MB) from aqueous solution by batch sorption technique. Effects of initial dye concentration, solution pH, solution temperature and sorbent dose on sorption were studied. It was seen that the removal of methylene blue increased with increasing initial dye concentration (from 25 to 100 mg/l), solution pH (from 5 to 10), solution temperature (from 20 to 50°C) and sorbent dose (from 0.