Abstract

OPTIMIZATION OF SACCHARIFICATION FOR ETHANOL PRODUCTION FROM WASTE PAPER

*Harjot Pal Kaur

Abstract

Natural resources such as petroleum have been exhausting at alarming rate over last decades so researchers have been working on converting biomass to fuel. A variety of feedstock and waste can be utilized biologically to produce alternative fuel ethanol. Main objective of this work was to optimize saccharification and to evaluate the potential of waste paper to be used as renewable feedstock for the production of ethanol. Waste papers were subjected to saccharification under varying parameters of substrate concentration, temperature and pH to find out the optimum parameters for production of reducing sugars and yield of reducing sugars (glucose) was determined by DNS method. Maximum amount of reducing sugars was produced at substrate concentration of 2% (8.5mg/g dry weight waste paper), temperature 60°C (10.6mg/g dry weight waste paper) and pH 4.5 (13.2mg/g dry weight waste paper). Temperature and pH range of 50-60°C and 4.0-5.0 respectively was found suitable for optimum yield of reducing sugars during the saccharification. After fermentation of saccharified waste paper with S. cerevisiae for six days the crude alcohol was purified by distillation and average alcohol contents from five distillates of each flask were determined by density method. Highest average alcohol content (17%) were calculated from fermentation broth saccharified with optimum pH (4.5) followed by optimum temperature (14%) and substrate concentration (9%). Results show that pH played the most significant role in the production of sugars during saccharification as maximum amount of sugars were produced with optimum pH. Ethanol was produced from waste paper by optimizing the saccharification parameters. Because of abundant availability of waste paper its utilization will help to alleviate environmental and land fill issues since waste paper is the dominant material in landfills.

Keywords: Alcohol content, Distillates, Fermentation, Reducing sugars, Saccharification.