Date of Award
8-2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Biosystems Engineering
Committee Member
Dr. Caye Drapcho, Committee Chair
Committee Member
Dr. John Nghiem
Committee Member
Dr. Terry Walker
Abstract
Sorghum has been proposed to be a complement to corn for ethanol production. Several advantages have been identified while using sorghum in agricultural and technological aspects. One of the differences between sorghum and corn is the presence of tannins. These compounds are well known for binding proteins and especially affecting enzymatic activity. This is the main disadvantage that sorghum has for ethanol production. High tannin sorghum hybrid XM217 was used to analyze the effect of tannin removal by alkaline pretreatment of sorghum for ethanol production. In this process, 87.6% of the tannins of sorghum were removed. A laboratory-scale dry milling process was used to generate the mashes to be fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Several ratios of corn and treated sorghum were tested, which included 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100% treated sorghum. A fermentation experiment using 100% untreated sorghum also was performed to obtain base-line results. The use of alkaline tannin removal generated a significant increase on the ethanol production compared to the untreated sorghum. The average theoretical yield increased from 68.2 ± 1.5% to 78.5 ± 2.5%, also average ethanol concentrations increased from 8.02 ± 0.15 to 9.39 ± 0.26 % w/v. Mixtures of 25, 50 and 75 and 100% treated sorghum produced the highest ethanol compared to the use of only corn or untreated sorghum. Cellulase was added to a similar set of experiments to determine the feasibility of the tannin removal treatment as a pretreatment method for cellulosic ethanol production. When using alkaline tannin removal with cellulase, a significantly higher ethanol production can be found compared to non-cellulase experiments. For 100% treated and 100% untreated sorghum trials, the average theoretical yield increased from 69.8 ± 1.7% to 94.6 ± 1.9%, also average ethanol concentrations improved from 8.77 ± 0.18 to 11.29 ± 0.21 % w/v.
Recommended Citation
Foglia, Franco E., "Evaluation of effectiveness of tannin removal by alkaline pretreatment on sorghum for ethanol production blended with corn" (2018). All Theses. 2948.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/2948