Radiation Microwave-Alkali Pretreatment of the Sawdust for the Glucose Production

Abstract

Abstract This research aims at the investigation of the effect of microwave radiation and low concentration alkali (NaOH) pretreatment to sawdust in a production process of glucose. The experiment has been conducted by varying the time period of heating and microwave power. Twenty grams of white teak sawdust collected in the South Konawe region have been heated by means of microwave radiation. Besides that, some pretreatment has also been carried out without heating. It has been obtained that at high power the longer the heating time the higher the concentration of the resulting glucose is. When the heating time of sawdust has been set for 2 minutes the concentration of the glucose is 7.09 mg/mL. The concentration in amount of 12.97 mg/mL has been obtained for the heating time 24 minutes. Under low power treatment, the experiment result showed that microwave energy did not have a significant effect on the glucose concentration. The same result has been also performed by the samples without heating. This experiment indicated that the variations of the combination between time and the power of microwave give significant influence to the increment of the glucose concentration. The result shows that giving pretreatment using microwave radiation can increase the glucose concentration of sawdust.