Abstract:
Energy from biomass, plays an important role as renewable energy to replace petroleum energy. Cellulose can be degraded into reducing sugar, predominantly glucose. Reducing sugar can be further fermented into ethanol. Therefore, the degradation of cellulose to reducing sugar has received a lot of research interest. This work aimed to prepare reducing sugar from cellulose by solution plasma, a novel method. The investigated parameters are treatment time, type of solvents, type of electrodes, the frequency of solution plasma, and the addition of hydrogen peroxide. The results showed that %yield of total reducing sugar (TRS) was greatly enhanced by plasma treatment using Fe electrode and sulfuric acid as a solvent. The % TRS was increased by 25%. This corresponded to the results of the high amount of hydroxyl radical detected in the system. Glycosidic bonds of cellulose were destroyed by hydroxyl radicals, generated by solution plasma, resulting in the degradation of cellulose. The effects of various frequency of plasma used to treat cellulose suspensions showed that, the %TRS was increased with increasing frequency of plasma. In the case of adding hydrogen peroxide into cellulose suspensions, it was found that the %TRS was the highest when 0.075% (v/v) of hydrogen peroxide was added. Possibly it was the amount of hydrogen peroxide added in the system that was sufficient to enhance to Fenton reaction, resulting in more hydroxyl radicals. From the result, it could be concluded that, the solution plasma process was successfully introduced to treat cellulose suspensions in order to prepare reducing sugar. The highest %TRS was achieved when sulfuric acid was used as solvent with Fe electrode, at the frequency of 30 kHz, and the addition of 0.075% (v/v) of hydrogen peroxide.