alkaline pre-treatment by using bases,such as NaOH, Ca(OH)2, KOH, and NH3.H2O, to remove lignin, hemicellulose, and/or cellulose, rendering
lignocellulosic biomass more degradable to microbes and enzymes. Alkaline treatment with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) has been extensively used in the pulp and paper industry, it is believed that the role of this pre-treatment consists in the saponification and cleavage of lignin-carbohydrate linkages by removal of crosslinks.
The purpose of pretreatments is to increase accessible surface area, increase penetration of enzymes and decrease crystallinity and its polymerization degree. Thus, to enhance microbial degradation of biomass, such pretreatments were used.
I'm not an expert on rice husk but hemicelluloses can certainly be removed by alkaline extraction from wood-based pulps. pH will affect the extent of deprotonation of the carboxylic groups present in pulps, so that at higher pH, more of the COOH will exist as COO-. Therefore fibers are more swollen in high alkalinities.
I already used NaOH for separating cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin from sugarcane bagasse after wash for bacteria grow and noted that the result depend on bacterial isolates. The attached paper include all these data.
Article Establishing an Effective Multi-Function System for Sugarcan...
Dear Doctor Shaban and Sunil
thank you for your oncern and valuable papers.
all my best regards
In our experience, the dilute acid treatment works better than the alkaline one.
We think the reason is the high silica content of rice hulls.
Please see the attached document.
You can follow the NREL standard protocol to determine the biomass composition (lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose)
http://www.nrel.gov/biomass/analytical_procedures.html
straw like rice straw and wheat straw, has lose structure, it is easily to remove the hemicellulose and lignin from the straw without or lightly breaking the cellulose. So, alkali-pretreatment could be used for the rice husk.
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