Pretreatment of Lignocellulosic Materials by High Voltage Electrical Discharge Pretreatment for Biogas Production

Anaerobic digestion process is achieved through several stages: hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis and methanogenesis. For organic matter degradation, the rate-limiting step is the hydrolysis. In order to improve hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion performance, one possibility is to use cell lyse pretreatments. Several pretreatments can be considered: mechanical, thermal or chemical treatments. The aim of these treatments is to solubilise organic compounds and/or to destroy tridimensional molecular structure (lignin or cellulose), and especially refractory compounds, in order to make them more biodegradable. Time of digestion can thus be reduced and biogas production can be increased. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of high voltage electrical discharge pretreatments on wheat straw by evaluating its impact on matter solubilisation (TDS, VDS and sCOD/tCOD ratio) and subsequent methane production.