Biofuels and Bioenergy

Biography

Biography: Nallusamy Sivakumar

Abstract

Waste paper is considered as one of the major components of municipal and industrial wastes and has the potential to be used as an excellent alternative feedstock for ethanol production. In this study, the effect of various pretreatments on efficient hydrolysis of waste office paper and newspaper into sugars and subsequent production of ethanol through fermentation was studied. The shredded papers were soaked in deionized water (5 % w/v), milled and dried at 60° C for 24 h. The dry matter was then milled again to remove most physical barriers of cellulose structure. The prepared waste papers were subjected to various pretreatments using sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide at a concentration of 0.1, 0.5 and 1% (v/v). Pretreatment with H₂O₂ (0.5 % v/v) at 121°C for 30 min was considered as the most effective method as it increased the available cellulose, produced a high sugar yield, high delignification and less inhibitors formation. The effect of single (37 FPU/g solids) and two enzyme mixture (37 FPU + 25 CBU/g solids) was carried out using 2% (w/v) solid loadings. The solid loadings experiment was done by loading 1-4% (w/v) solids with 37 FPU + 25 CBU/g solids of enzyme loadings. The enzymatic hydrolysis of pretreated office paper and newspaper with 3% solid loadings resulted in the sugar yield of 23.48 and 13.12 g/L with hydrolysis efficiency of 91.8 and 79.6 %, respectively. Further, the hydrolysates of office paper and newspaper were used as a substrate to produce ethanol through fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae resulted about 11.15 and 6.65 g/L with the productivity of 0.32 and 0.28 (g ethanol/L/h), respectively. Thus, the improved yields achieved through the pretreatment with 0.5% H₂O₂ and subsequent ethanol production suggested that the wastepaper could be used as a potential feedstock for bioethanol production.

Recent Publications:

1. Al-Siyabi B, Gujarathi AM, Sivakumar N (2017) Harmonic Multi-objective Differential Evolution Approach for Multi-objective Optimization of Fed-Batch Bioreactor. Materials and manufacturing processes http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 10426914. 2017.1279308.
2. Annamalai N, Sivakumar N (2016) Production of polyhydroxybutyrate from wheat bran hydrolysate. Journal of Biotechnology 237: 13–17.
3. Aishwarya R, Sivakumar N, Reginald V (2016) Fish waste-Potential low cost substrate for bacterial protease production: A brief review. The Open Biotechnology Journal 10: 335-341.
4. Sivakumar N, Al Zadjali A, Al Bahry S, Elshafie A and Eltayeb EA (2016) Isolation and characterization of cellulolytic Bacillus licheniformis from compost. African Journal of Biotechnology 15:  2434-2446.
5. L-Kharousi M, Sivakumar N, Elshafie A (2015) Characterization of cellulase enzyme produced by Chaetomium sp. isolated from books and archives, Eurasian Journal of Biosciences 9: 52-60.