Summary: | Pretreatment was an inevitable process in the biorefinery process of lignocellulosic biomass utilization. Generally, biomass was considered an essential carbon source that could be converted into several bio-based products such as biofuels and biochemicals. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of combined hydrochemo-mechanical pretreatment of rice straw for bioethanol production. Rice straw was pretreated with autoclave followed by ball-milling pretreatment. The hydrochemical pretreatment was performed in an autoclave with different concentrations of NaOH (1 and 10%) at 121 °C for two different durations (30, 60 min). The pretreated biomasses were then subjected to ball-milling pretreatment for size reduction and subsequently hydrolyzed via enzymatic and bioethanol fermentation. The obtained results indicated that the highest reducing sugars were 0.4513 kg reducing sugar/kg biomass obtained by 1% of NaOH at 121 °C, 30 min, which provided the highest energy efficiency and the lowest waste generation was 0.1423 kg reducing sugar/kWh and 0.2570 kg of waste/kg reducing sugar respectively. Moreover, the highest bioethanol yield was 0.0491 kg/kg biomass obtained from a similar condition. Additionally, the combined pretreatment suggested that it could be an alternative pretreatment for a lignocellulosic biorefinery in industrial applications.
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