Yield evaluation of enzyme hydrolysis and dark fermentation of the brown seaweed Rugulopteryx okamurae hydrothermally pretreated by microwave irradiation

Abstract

Microwave irradiation has been applied to solubilise the organic matter from the invasive seaweed Rugulopterix okamurae as pretreatment for two conventional biological processes: enzyme hydrolysis (EH) for obtaining reducing sugars (RS) and dark fermentation (DF) for obtaining volatile fatty acids (VFAs). As operational conditions for the microwave pretreatment, temperature and time has been tested between 120 and 220 °C and 5–20 min respectively. The maximum solubilisation yield in terms of DOC (26%) through the microwave pretreatment was registered at 220 °C at 20 min. However, the maximum concentration for RS (1.8 g/L) was obtained at 200 °C at 20 min due to the decomposition of monomeric sugars at high temperature and the total polyphenols (TP) were above 0.25 g/L (where inhibition in dark fermentation begins to be noticiable) at 180 °C. When the pretreated biomass was used for the EH the maximum accumulated RS production was 160 mg-RS/g-biomass, at 220 °C which was a 35% better than the RS production for non-pretreated biomass. In the case of the DF tests, the maximum yield of VFAs obtained with the pretreated biomass was 46.3 mg/g-biomass at 220 °C while the maximum hydrogen yield was obtained at 200 °C (6.6 mL-H2/g-biomass) due to the high level of TP (1.1 g/L) of pretreated biomass at 220 °C. Despite of this toxic effect, the VFAs production at 220 °C was 93% higher than in the non-pretreated biomass.