Optimization of Sugar cane bagasse pretreatment process using RSM

ABSTRACT For sugar cane bagasse to be used as a substrate for ethanol production, it must be initially hydrolyzed to fermentable sugar. For efficient hydrolysis of the sugarcane bagasse to fermentable sugar, optimization of the process factors was achieved using central composite design (CCD). The CCD involved four numeric factors which were; temperature, time, sodium hydroxide concentration and substrate/NaOH ratio with sugar content as the response. Sulphuric acid was used for the hydrolysis. Quadratic with two factors interaction (2FI) model was developed to predict the sugar content. Numeric optimization done gave the optimum conditions as; temperature of 120oC, time of 120 minutes, sodium hydroxide concentration of 2.5% and substrate/NaOH ratio of 1:10 with predicted final sugar content of 348.082mg/l. These optimum conditions were validated with little error of 0.2%