Combined-book

Srinivas Reddy Kamireddy; Yun Ji University of North Dakota Chemical Engineering Graduate Student; Assistant Professor kamireddy.srinu@gmail.com Poster Title: Effect and Mechanism of Metal Salt Catalysts in Biomass Pretreatment and Enzymatic Hydrolysis Abstract: The goal of this research is to understand the effects of different metal cations on biomass pretreatments (i.e. xylose and glucose yields and inhibitor product formation) and to evaluate the enzymatic saccharification performance of the metal salt enhanced pretreated solids. The metal salts chosen for the study were CuCl2, FeCl3, and AlCl3. The effects of these metal salts were studied at 150째C and 160 째C) with molar concentrations of 0.075M and 0.125M. The reaction time was kept constant at 10 min. Xylan solubility increased with increase in molarity and reaction temperature for FeCl3 or CuCl2. A similar trend was observed for cellulose digestibility for FeCl3 orCuCl2. However, the samples treated with AlCl3 has very low xylose yield since most of the xylose was degrading into furfural. The amount of furfural increased drastically for samples treated at 160 째C. This implies that Fe3+, Cu2+ and Al3+cations salts acidify the solution possibly through undergoing hydrolysis reactions.