Investigação do efeito de pré-tratamentos na estrutura de biomassas lignocelulósicas para o isolamento de celuloses de alta reatividade

Abstract

The lignocellulosic biomass is composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin strongly bonded to each other and stands out as a highly available and promising raw material for conversion processes. Cellulose has been widely studied in literature as a renewable source for the production of chemical platforms, molecules of great importance for the biorefinery industry capable of being converted into the most diverse chemical compounds used in today's society. However, the efficient separation of cellulose is still challenging due to the recalcitrant nature of the biomass. Thus, this work aims to evaluate the efficiency of the combined acid/peroxide-alkaline (APA) pretreatment, the ultrasound cavitation (US) and the association of both methods (USA + PA) under different conditions in increasing the accessibility of common residual biomasses in the Brazilian Northeast: sugarcane bagasse (Saccharum officinarum), corn cob (Zea mays) and prickly pear pseudostem (Opuntia ficusindica L. Mill.), as well as on the crystallinity changes of the celluloses that will be isolated later. For this, the peak deconvolution of X-ray diffraction (XRD) data was compared to the absorption bands generated by the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) analysis of the samples, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the APA treatment under conditions already found in the literature and in a new methodology with ultrasonic assisted acidic step (US). The cavitation made possible the production of a more accessible biomass under milder conditions of acid treatment (30 min, 90 °C) for removing hemicellulose and with shorter time (60 min) of the delignification step (peroxide-alkaline) for sugarcane bagasse and prickly pear pseudostem samples. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images confirmed the modification of biomass morphology after pretreatment by the formation of fissures, pores and a stratified cell wall, thus reducing their recalcitrance and enabling the isolation of low crystallinity celluloses after bleaching. The deconvolution methodology was also applied to the derived thermogravimetric curves (DTG) and was successful for separating the overlapping mass loss events and in the determination of the mass content of lignocellulosic fractions by calculating the area under each degradation curve, with precision and accuracy comparable to the standard characterization method for these biomasses.