Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia; Research Centre for Sustainable Process Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia. Electronic address: jamal@ukm.edu.my
  • 3 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia; Research Centre for Sustainable Process Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 4 School of Chemical Science and Food Technology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 5 Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI 48823, USA
  • 6 Research Centre for Sustainable Process Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
Bioresour Technol, 2016 Jul;211:200-8.
PMID: 27017130 DOI: 10.1016/j.biortech.2016.02.135

Abstract

Oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) fibre is widely available in Southeast Asian countries and found to have 60% (w/w) sugar components. OPEFB was pretreated using the ammonia fibre expansion (AFEX) method and characterised physically by the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The results show that there were significant structural changes in OPEFB after the pretreatment step, and the sugar yield after enzymatic hydrolysis using a cocktail of Cellic Ctec2® and Cellic Htec2® increased from 0.15gg(-1) of OPEFB in the raw untreated OPEFB sample to 0.53gg(-1) of OPEFB in AFEX-pretreated OPEFB (i.e. almost a fourfold increase in sugar conversion), which enhances the economic value of OPEFB. A biohydrogen fermentability test of this hydrolysate was carried out using a locally isolated bacterium, Enterobacter sp. KBH6958. The biohydrogen yield after 72h of fermentation was 1.68mol H2 per mol sugar. Butyrate, ethanol, and acetate were the major metabolites.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.