Pretreatment of Oil Palm Fronds for Improving Hemicelluloses Content for Higher Recovery of Xylose

Lignocelluloses material is known as a potential biomass for conversion into value-added product. Utilization of biomass for beneficial products particularly food and health-related, has gained increasing attention among researchers worldwide and the potential usage of the lignocelluloses biomass is much sought after nowadays. An oil palm frond (OPF) has a great potential to be used as a precursor for production of xylose. In order to increase the yield of xylose, pretreatment of lignocelluloses biomass is important as it will for example, enhance the accessibility of enzyme to convert hemicelluloses xylan into xylose. Therefore in this study, OPF was pre-treated using dilute acid hydrolysis (H_2SO_4), alkali (NaOH), and autohydrolysis methods. The result showed that autohydrolysis gave higher hemicelluloses content which was 27.80±0.35% as compared to alkali and dilute acid pretreatment with 17.51±0.61% and 27.37±1.89%, respectively. The autohydrolysis pretreated samples were then used for further enzymatic hydrolysis for xylan breakdown into xylose. Recovery of xylose was found to be higher at higher xylanase activity which was16 U. Reaction time of 48 h with 1% substrate was able to produce up to 0.795 g/L xylose.