Silva K., Godoy P., Cardoso J., Mendes T., Seolatto A., Freitas F., 2013, Study of Orange Bagasse Digestibility by Chemical Pretreatments, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 35, 1045-1050.
The search for sustainable energy resources has to pass by the waste. Thereby it will be possible to solve two great problems: the increasing necessity for energy and the waste discard. Inside this reality, the lignocellulosic materials seem to be a good option to produce liquid biofuels. Specifically to Brazil, one of the biggest orange juice producers, the orange bagasse might be a candidate. The first step to study the potential of a new material to produce bioethanol is analysed its performance in the pretreatment. Hence this is the objective of this work. It was studied, based on a 2³ factorial design, the mass loss of the orange bagasse submitted to lime and alkaline hydrogen peroxide pretreatments. The two higher mass loss for the calcium hydroxide were 72.03 % and 71.30 % achieved with 80 °C and 40 h, and for the alkaline hydrogen peroxide the better results were 61.12 % and 60.00 % in 24 h and with 0.6 mm particle size.
