High consistency enzymatic saccharification of sweet sorghum bagasse pretreated with liquid hot water.

A laboratory set-up was designed to carry out high consistency enzymatic saccharification of sweet sorghum bagasse (SSB) which was pretreated by liquid hot water (LHW). The effects of two impellers on enzymatic hydrolysis of SSB were investigated. Compared with the double-curved-blade impeller (DCBI), the plate-and-frame impeller (PFI) could improve glucose production by 10%. Tween80 and fed-batch hydrolysis method adopted in this study produced total sugar of 17.06 g/L more than batch hydrolysis and raised the substrate consistency to 30%. At the final substrate loading of 30%, the concentrations of cellobiose, glucose and xylose reached to 15.01 g/L, 88.95 g/L and 9.80 g/L, respectively, and the ethanol concentration reached to 43.36 g/L in the case of cellobiose and xylose were not fermented by Saccharomyces cerevisiae Y2034. This study is an attempt at improvement of enzyme hydrolyzing LHW-pretreated material at high consistency.