Preliminary Study on Natural Freeze-thaw Pretreatment of Wheat straw

The straw biomass pretreatment technology is the key to the study of fuel ethanol. Freeze-thaw pretreatment of wheat straw is in its infancy. In this paper, we investigated influencing factors including the ratio of solid to liquid, crushed particle size, the difference of the solid to liquid in the wet milling processing. When the solid-liquid ratio is 1:18, hydrolysis rate can be increased by 17.93% and when crushed particle size of 120 meshes, enzymatic hydrolysis rate of 39.55%. Due to the traditional freeze-thaw technology is simply freezing and thawing process, the enzymatic hydrolysis rate only can be increased by about 15%. Therefore, we improve traditional process by wet grinding and freeze-thaw combining at the same time to take advantage of the cold weather in winter for the purpose to improve treatment effectiveness and feasibility of freezing and thawing. After this treatment, enzymatic hydrolysis rate increased by 57.50%.