I want to know which chemical compounds are most commonly used for substrate pretreatment for biofuel production?
It depends on the targeted fuel, depends on the type of biomass. For example if you want to prepare biogas, diesel, alcohol, butanol or other, depending on the starting biomass, you have to use other type of pre-treatment.
For example, if you use polymer sugars (starch or cellulose) and you want to use fermentation, you have to use treatment (e.g. with dilute sulfuric acid) to hydrolize.
If you want to depolymerize and dewatering together, to prepare furfural derivatives or likes, more concentrated acid has to be used to cyclize the linear sugars with water elimination.
The pre-treatment stronbgly depends on the chemcial "composition" of the starting biomass. What are the components: sugars, starch, cellulose, lignin, fatty acid glycerides, etc.
So, your question is enough general, we should know more exactly what you would like to know.
I totally agree with Laszló Kótai. It depends of the applications you want to carry out.
From my point of view, you need to take care about the conditions of your pretreatment too. If you apply very drastic conditions you can deconstruct all the biomass but you can generate inhibitors or toxics too.
I too agree with Laszló Kótai. I tried evaluating pretreatment technologies for various lignocellulosic substrates. I found effective pretreatment technology varies for substrates, which means that pretreatment technology depends on nature and type of biomass. Also, apart from optimizing pretreatment technology, factors influencing pretreatment technology should also be optimized using DoE/Soft computing techniques.
