Novel Batch Reactor for the Dilute Acid Pretreatment of Lignocellulosic Feedstocks with Improved Heating and Cooling Kinetics∗

The pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass is an important part of the process of utilizing a renewable and abundant feedstock. This paper aims to provide a novel lab-scale batch pretreatment reactor that significantly improves heating and cooling kinetics over typical batch pretreatment reactors, yet made from readily available parts. The heating and cooling kinetics of a batch pretreatment reac-tor are important for emulating the behavior of a large scale continuous reactor system. The heat transfer performance has been quantified and presented here as a tool for aiding the design of a similar reactor system. One important ligno-cellulosic feedstock is corn stover, which was used in this study to validate the reactor performance. The pretreatment method that was used in this study is the dilute acid pretreatment. The pretreatment runs were enzymatically saccharified to evaluate the pretreatment effectiveness. The results from this enzymatic sac-charification were compared with several literature sources to validate the reactor performance. The pretreatment conditions that were used are 0.5 wt % sulfuric acid, 10 minute pretreatment time, and 10 wt % solids loading. The enzymatic di-gestibility of the cellulose in the pretreated solids was 53.3 % at 150◦C and 72.1% at 160◦C