Chemical composition in sugarcane bagasse: Delignification with sodium hydroxide

Abstract

Sugarcane Bagasse is a cheap agro-based waste material. These biomass materials have a lot of potential to be converted into useful products such as carbon. Sugarcane Bagasse was extracted by Sodium Hydroxide. Several characterizations has been done to analyse the chemical properties of Sugarcane Bagasse  after extraction by Sodium Hydroxide including FTIR, XRF, HPLC and SEM-EDS. SEM shows an increases in  internal surface area of the lignocellulose particles, as well as weakening the structural while EDS shows 60.59 % content of carbon. HPLC results show some peak at different retention time. The organic compound can be observed by at retention time 9.611 minute with 66.428 % height and it was identified as schaftoside. FTIR shows that when peak at 1096 cm-1 to 1638 cm-1 there was presence of H-O-H (water adsorption). The element with the highest concentration that are found by using XRF in untreated sugarcane bagasse is water, H2O (98.5 %), followed by Sodium, Na (0.669 %), and Sulfur, S (0.638 %). The concentration of each element were decreasing (except H2O) after being treated with NaOH. Sugarcane bagasse which is treated with alkaline solution is more suitable to be applied in the industry compared to acidic solution. This is due to the high reactivity of acidic solution that may damage the entire structural compounds of sugarcane bagasse