Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Pretreated Sugarcane Straw: Kinetic Study and Semi-Mechanistic Modeling

Although there are already commercial-scale productions of second generation (2G) ethanol, focusing efforts on process optimization can be of key importance to make the production cost-effective in large scale. In this scenario, mathematical models may be useful in design, scale-up, optimization, and control of bioreactors. For this reason, the aim of this work was to study the kinetics of the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose from sugarcane straw. Experiments using hydrothermally pretreated sugarcane (HPS) straw (195 °C, 10 min, 200 rpm) with and without alkaline delignification (4 % NaOH m/v, 30 min, 121 °C) were carried out in shake flasks (50 °C, pH 5.0, 200 rpm). Solid load was varied in a range of 0.8 to 10 % (m/v), in initial velocity and long-term assays. Enzyme concentration (Cellic®CTec2) was varied from 5 to 80 filter paper unit (FPU) gcellulose (-1). It was possible to fit Michaelis-Menten (MM), modified MM, with and without competitive inhibition by glucose, and Chrastil models. Chrastil model and modified MM with inhibition (both suitable for heterogeneous system, with high resistance to internal diffusion) showed more appropriate than pseudo-homogeneous MM model. The fitted models were able to identify key features of the hydrolysis process and can be very useful within the perspective of bioreactors engineering.