Leading pretreatments for enhancing the degradability of lignocellulosic wastes and the final products
Abstract
Lignocellulose is the major source for bioenergy (biogas and ethanol) recovery. The first step is enzymatic hydrolysis. Enzymatic hydrolysis is the rate-limiting step due to the complex structure of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. This paper reviewed the effect of current leading pretreatments on the digestibility of lignocellulosic wastes; the pretreatments can be classified as physical, chemical, biological, and physical-chemical methods. The effects of different pretreatments were mainly evaluated by the efficiency of biogas or ethanol production. In addition, some important parameters, such as lignin content, particle size, crystallinity, accessible surface area, and sugar yield were used as indicators of the effects of pretreatments.