Rice straw pretreatment with KOH/urea for enhancing sugar yield and ethanol production at low temperature

In this experiment, a low-temperature (< 100 °C) KOH/urea (KU) pretreatment of rice straw (RS) was performed to enhance its bioconversion to ethanol. The pretreatment factors were optimized by Box-Behnken Design of response surface method (RSM), resulting in an optimum KU concentration of 3%, with a solid to liquid ratio of 1:15 for 3 h at 70 °C. Under the above conditions, five-times higher sugar yields (92.38 %) and six-times higher ethanol...