Issue 1, 2020

Ammonia-salt solvent promotes cellulosic biomass deconstruction under ambient pretreatment conditions to enable rapid soluble sugar production at ultra-low enzyme loadings

Abstract

Here, we report a novel ammonia : ammonium salt solvent based pretreatment process that can rapidly dissolve crystalline cellulose into solution and eventually produce highly amorphous cellulose under near-ambient conditions. Pre-activating the cellulose I allomorph to its ammonia–cellulose swollen complex (or cellulose III allomorph) at ambient temperatures facilitated rapid dissolution of the pre-activated cellulose in the ammonia-salt solvent (i.e., ammonium thiocyanate salt dissolved in liquid ammonia) at ambient pressures. For the first time in reported literature, we used time-resolved in situ neutron scattering methods to characterize the cellulose polymorphs structural modification and understand the mechanism of crystalline cellulose dissolution into a ‘molecular’ solution in real-time using ammonia-salt solvents. We also used molecular dynamics simulations to provide insight into solvent interactions that non-covalently disrupted the cellulose hydrogen-bonding network and understand how such solvents are able to rapidly and fully dissolve pre-activated cellulose III. Importantly, the regenerated amorphous cellulose recovered after pretreatment was shown to require nearly ∼50-fold lesser cellulolytic enzyme usage compared to native crystalline cellulose I allomorph for achieving near-complete hydrolytic conversion into soluble sugars. Lastly, we provide proof-of-concept results to further showcase how such ammonia-salt solvents can pretreat and fractionate lignocellulosic biomass like corn stover under ambient processing conditions, while selectively co-extracting ∼80–85% of total lignin, to produce a highly digestible polysaccharide-enriched feedstock for biorefinery applications. Unlike conventional ammonia-based pretreatment processes (e.g., Ammonia Fiber Expansion or Extractive Ammonia pretreatments), the proposed ammonia-salt process can operate at near-ambient conditions to greatly reduce the pressure/temperature severity necessary for conducting effective ammonia-based pretreatments on lignocellulose.

Graphical abstract: Ammonia-salt solvent promotes cellulosic biomass deconstruction under ambient pretreatment conditions to enable rapid soluble sugar production at ultra-low enzyme loadings

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
11 Oct 2019
Accepted
29 Nov 2019
First published
29 Nov 2019

Green Chem., 2020,22, 204-218

Author version available

Ammonia-salt solvent promotes cellulosic biomass deconstruction under ambient pretreatment conditions to enable rapid soluble sugar production at ultra-low enzyme loadings

S. P. S. Chundawat, L. D. C. Sousa, S. Roy, Z. Yang, S. Gupta, R. Pal, C. Zhao, S. Liu, L. Petridis, H. O'Neill and S. V. Pingali, Green Chem., 2020, 22, 204 DOI: 10.1039/C9GC03524A

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