Poster Presentation 3-54
New Material -- Steam Exploded Straw -- for Hydrogen Fermentation
Dongmin Li, Hongzhang Chen* and Zuohu Li
Key State Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering
Institute of Process Engineering
Chinese Academy of Science
Beijing 100080. China
Fax: 08610-62561822
E-mail: chenhzh@yahoo.com
A new renewable material, steam exploded straw (SES), was used for hydrogen fermentation by C. butylicum A86 in the mode of SSF. There is a great number of soluble saccharides in SES that could be used as substrate for hydrogen fermentation beginning. The pH of SES decreased quickly to about 4.8 after being inoculated for acids produced during C. butylicum A86 metabolizing. Because the activity of cellulase was the highest at this pH, C. butylicum A86 cooperated with cellulase very well and the hemicellulose and cellulose were decomposed into soluble saccharide further to be used for fermentation. The factors that influenced hydrogen fermentation, including temperature, nitrogen and phosphorus, moisture content, pH and inoculation, were optimized in the experiments and the yield of hydrogen was up to 44.7ml H2/g SES.