Environmentally friendly pretreatment of plant biomass by planetary and attrition milling

This study evaluated the use of planetary and attrition milling as pretreatment processes for lignocellulosic biomass using rice straw. Planetary milling reduced the rice straw crystallinity from 0.48 to 0.11. Since the samples could be milled and enzymatically treated using the same media, loss of the biomass due to washing was effectively eliminated. In contrast, conventional sodium hydroxide and soaking in aqueous ammonia (SAA) processes showed a loss of 34.2% and 14.8%, respectively. Furthermore, milling produced significantly lower concentrations of soluble phenolics than the alkali treatments. Using a bioluminescent bioreporter strain that is sensitive to these phenolics, neither of the milled samples elicited a response while the sodium hydroxide and SAA samples led to a 25.8 and 4.7 -fold induction, respectively. Although planetary milling produced more reducing sugars than attrition milling before saccharification, both had similar monosaccharide yields, i.e., 0.38 and 0.34 g/g-biomass, respectively, when 40 g/l rice straw was treated.