Investigation of alkaline hydrogen peroxide pretreatment to enhance enzymatic hydrolysis and phenolic compounds of oil palm trunk

Alkaline hydrogen peroxide (AHP) as a pretreatment effectively enhances the increasing enzymatic digestibility of oil palm trunk (OPT) for conversion to biofuels and bioproducts in the biorefinery processes. The effect of hydrogen peroxide concentration (1-5%), temperature (50-90 degrees C), and time (30-90 min) were studied to find out the optimum condition for the removal of lignin. The optimum condition attained at 70 degrees C, 30 min, and 3% H2O2 g /g of biomass not only increased the cellulose content from 38.67% in raw material to 73.96% but also removed lignin and hemicellulose up to 50% and 57.12%, respectively. The AHP-treated fibers subjected to enzyme hydrolysis showed significant improvement in glucose concentration that increased from 11.77 (+/- 0.84) g/L (raw material) to 46.15 (+/- 0.32) g/L with 59.82% enzyme digestibility at 96 h. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transformation infrared (FT-IR) were employed to analyze the morphology and structural changes of untreated and AHP-treated fibers. SEM results showed disruption of the intact OPT structure resulting in increase of enzyme accessibility to cellulose. The FT-IR identified changes in peaks which indicated structural transformation and dissolution of both lignin and hemicellulose molecules caused by AHP treatment. The black liquor obtained from AHP treatment contained about 5.13 mg gallic acid equivalent (GAE)/g of dry sample of total phenolic content (TPC) and an antioxidant activity of 59.80% and 65.51% inhibitions of DPPH and ABTS assays, respectively. Hence, it is a sustainable approach to utilize waste for the recovery of multiple value-added products during pretreatment process.