Improved reducing sugars production from enzymatic hydrolysis of rubber wood by surfactant-assisted hydrothermal pretreatment

Abstract

In this work, a facile and environmentally friendly strategy was proposed for the production of reducing sugars from enzymatic hydrolysis of rubber wood by surfactant-assisted hydrothermal pretreatment. Compared with hydrothermal pretreatment, the addition of surfactants (Tween 40) significantly increased the reducing sugars concentration, the highest reducing sugars concentration was up to 22.47 g/L. After surfactant-assisted pretreatment, the crystallinity index of rubber wood hydrolysis residues increased and then decreased with the addition amount of Tween 40. The surfactant-assisted pretreated rubber wood featured high cellulose and hemicellulose conversion rates of 95.1% and 95.4% respectively, which was 122.2% and 41.1% higher than the hydrothermally pretreated rubber wood. It was also found that surfactant-assisted hydrothermal pretreatment had the same improvement effect on increasing the sugar production of other lignocellulose. The results showed that surfactant-assisted hydrothermal pretreatment is a promising and universal method for developing biomass-based products.

Keywords:

• Reducing sugars
• rubber wood
• surfactant-assisted pretreatment
• conversion rates

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for the financial supports from New Teacher Research and Training Project of Doctoral/Master’s Thesis Extension [2023011WYS015], and Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province [2022J01981], Tianjin Research Innovation Project for Postgraduate Students [2022BKYZ008 and 2022SKYZ064].