Modeling the Thermochemical Pretreatment of Eucalyptus globulus for Bioethanol Production

Abstract

The production processes of second generation (2G) ethanol from lignocellulosic materials have been extensively studied in the last decades. In particular, the pretreatment of the raw material has received an important amount of research. This stage has the purpose of decomposing the hemicellulose and lignin walls to improve the yield of glucose on the next step (enzymatic hydrolysis). Among the raw materials studied, Eucalyptus wood has an important number of experimental works in the pretreatment, but few works propose a detailed model expressing the reaction kinetics of the compounds involved. In this work, we propose a mathematical model describing the reaction of the most relevant compounds involved in three pretreatments (diluted sulfuric acid, autohydrolysis, and steam explosion) taking Eucalyptus globulus as a raw material. The proposed model adequately adjusts the three thermochemical processes. The advantage, as compared to others in the bibliography, is that it contemplates a greater number of compounds in a wide range of process conditions. The model is simultaneously adjusted to contemplate the correlations among the parameters that describe the kinetics of each compound, using the complete set of available experimental data.