Vol. 8, Issue 1 (2019)

Author(s):
Poonam Sharma, Nivedita Sharma and Nisha Sharma

Abstract:
Fermentation of carbohydrates to produce bioethanol is one of the pathways to produce biofuels from microalgae. In the present work, enzymatic pre-treatment was performed on microalgal species to disrupt and break down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, as a prerequisite step to produce bioethanol. A mixture of different in house enzymes (cellulase: amylase: xylanase: pectinase) was used for enzymatic hydrolysis of untreated and pretreated algal biomass and different process parameters were optimized by using one factor at a time approach. The process parameters optimized for enhanced hydrolysis were enzymatic ratio, enzymatic dosage, temperature and incubation time. The best optimized conditions obtained were enzymatic ratio 5:3:1:1 (cellulase: amylase: xylanase: pectinase) @ dose of 12.5 ml/g of biomass, temperature 45 ^ºC and incubation period 48 h yielding 140.72 mg/g and 195.84 mg/g of reducing sugars for untreated and pretreated biomass respectively. The results obtained proved the effectiveness of enzymatic hydrolysis to enhance complex carbohydrates break down into simple sugars in bioethanol production process from micro algal biomass.