Enhancing Bioconversion Potential of Duckweed by Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide Pretreatment Methods to Improve Biofuel Productivity

摘要

One of the main triggers of the climate change is the consumption of fossil derivative fuel to satisfy the energy need, and also it is clearly known that the future of the fossil fuel supply is limited. That is why, finding and using alternative, sustainable, renewable, and eco-friendly energy sources are inevitable to fight climate change and to reduce the global warming. Biomass is a well-known renewable material for energy production and is called as biofuels. There are some limitations to utilize the biomass effectively, because of the structure of their molecular forms. For this very reason, the pretreatment pathways to increase the biomass sugar concentration potential to increase the bioconversion potential are attempted in this study. Two different pretreatment methods, i.e., hydrogen peroxide and acid, were applied to biomass, which in this case is duckweed, taken from artificial pond at Nigde, Turkey. In order to determine important factors of the processes, Plackett-Burman design was used. Chemicals dosages, timing, temperature, solid ratio, and mesh size are identified using this methodology to obtain the interested results. Box-Behnken statistical design method was applied to make the optimization of the factors chosen from the factorial design. Consequently, Box-Behnken test indicated that acid pretreatment method showed slightly better results than the hydrogen peroxide application per total sugar concentration, which are 0.60 and 0.48 g/L, respectively.