(547c) Isoconversional Methods to Model Oxidative Alkaline Pretreatment of Lignocellulose

Oxidative alkaline pretreatment has proven successful to increase lignocellulose digestibility. In order to properly assess its effects, it is necessary to kinetically model the process. Most efforts to model pretreatment obtain kinetic parameters (i.e., activation energy and frequency factors) from model fitting methods using rate laws. The Isoconversional method is an alternative that in addition to being more accurate because does not depend on a so called constant temperature, is also usually simpler. In spite of these facts, isconversional methods have not been applied to kinetically model pretreatment.

The present work applies isoconversional methods to model oxidative alkaline pretreatment of sugar cane bagasse addressing a main difficulty inherent to the method: the need to provide large amount of data. This has been accomplished by implementing a novel procedure to estimate lignin and carbohydrates contents in lignocellulose. It uses the partial least square (PLS) method combined with Near Infrarred (NIR) Spectroscopy Analysis. The method was proven succesful to obtain kinetic parameters that were shown to be temperature dependent.