Agriculture & Food, Volume 5, 2017

Abstract: Cotton stalks were subjected to pretreatments using GVL-H2O, GVL-H2O-H2SO4, GVL-TEAHSO4, TEAHSO4-H2O and EMIMAc at 135°C and biomass loadings of 10% and 15% for one hour. The results demonstrated GVL as a promising pretreatment agent since GVL-H2O pretreated biomass gave similar enzymatic hydrolysis yields compared to the yields obtained from those subjected to pretreatment via triethylammonium hydrogen sulfate (TEAHSO4). GVL-H2O (80 wt.%-20 wt.%) pretreated cotton stalks at 10% biomass loading resulted in 37.6% biomass digestibility at the 48th hour of the enzymatic reaction which was roughly 12-fold higher than the digestibility of untreated samples. It was also concluded that GVL-H2O in the absence of an acid catalyst successfully deconstructed the cotton stalks at higher biomass loadings (15%) which hasn’t been yet shown in the literature. The digestibility increased from 37.6% to 39.3% at the 48th hour of the enzymatic hydrolysis of cotton stalks subjected to GVL-H2O pretreatment when biomass loading increased from 10% to 15%.