Enhancing cellulosic digestibility of wheat straw by adding sodium lignosulfonate and sodium hydroxide to hydrothermal pretreatment.

Surfactant-assisted pretreatment has been widely reported to improve the enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulose by promoting removal of xylan and lignin. Hence, this work innovatively proposed the use of sodium lignosulfonate (SL) as an additive of alkaline pretreatment (AP), and evaluated its influence on the cellulosic digestibility of wheat straw (WS). The results displayed that the maximum of 72-h cellulosic digestibility could reach 83.5% as 15 g/L SL was introduced to the AP process (SAP), while the cellulosic digestibility of hydrothermal and alkaline pretreated WS was only 63.6% and 70.2%, respectively. These increments were subsequently attributed to the improvement of 6.5% xylan and 26.8% lignin accelerated by SAP, resulting in positive changes in structural characteristics such as accessibility, specific surface area, and cellulosic crystalline structure. The utilization of lignin-based surfactants in pretreatment has realized the economic feasibility of lignocellulosic biorefining and broadened the application prospect of surfactants.

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Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.