Improvement of sugar recovery from Sida acuta (Thailand Weed) by NaOH pretreatment and application to bioethanol production

Sida acuta, a common type of weed in Thailand, contains relatively high cellulose (42.7%) content. We pretreated NaOH to improve glucose recovery from S. acuta. The effect of pretreatment temperature and NaOH concentration was fundamentally investigated based on hydrolysis efficiency with recovery of solid fraction. The pretreatment condition was determined to be 3% NaOH at 60 °C for 9 h, which showed the highest glucose recovery. The hydrolysates obtained by enzymatic hydrolysis of S. acuta were applied to the fermentation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae K35, and a theoretical yield of 97.6% was achieved at 18 h. This indicated that the hydrolysates medium without detoxification had no negative effects on the fermentation. The production of biomass into bioethanol was evaluated based on the material balance of 1,000 g basis. Following this estimation, approximately 28 g and 110 g bioethanol could be produced by untreated and pretreated S. acuta, respectively, and this production was improved about 3.9-fold by NaOH pretreatment. These results again show the importance of pretreatment in biorefinery process.