Alkaline Pretreatment of Sweet Sorghum Bagasse for Bioethanol Production

Lignocellulosic material, which consist mainly of cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin, are among the most promising renewable feedstocks for the production of energy and chemicals. The bagasse residue of sweet sorghum can be utilized as raw material for alternative energy such as bioethanol. Bioethanol production consists of pretreatment, saccharification, fermentation and purification process. The pretreatment process was of great importance to ethanol yield. In the present study, alkaline pretreatment was conducted using a steam explosion reactor at 1300C with concentrations of NaOH 6, and 10% (kg/L) for 10, and 30 min. For ethanol production separated hydrolysis and fermentation (SHF) and simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) process were conducted with 30 FPU of Ctec2 and Htec2 enzyme and yeast of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The results showed that maximum cellulose conversion to total glucose plus xylose were showed greatest with NaOH 10% for 30 min. The highest yield of ethanol is 96.26% and high concentration of ethanol 66.88 g/L were obtained at SSF condition during 48 h process. Using SSF process could increase yields and concentration of ethanol with less energy process. Article History: Received January 16th 2016; Received in revised form May 25th 2016; Accepted June 28th 2016; Available online How to Cite This Article: Sudiyani, Y., Triwahyuni, E., Muryanto, Burhani, D., Waluyo, J. Sulaswaty, A. and Abimanyu, H. (2016) Alkaline Pretreatment of Sweet Sorghum Bagasse for Bioethanol Production. Int. Journal of Renewable Energy Development, 5(2), 113-118. http://dx.doi.org/10.14710/ijred.5.2.113-11

STMIK PalComTech Customer Service Questionnaire Processing Application Design

Purpose: The focus of this research is to create a Consumer Service Questionnaire Dashboard application that can perform questionnaire data processing, service satisfaction analysis and reporting the results of service improvement recommendations at STMIK PalComTech.Design/methodology/approach: This study uses the Prototype method, where this method can interact with the user during user creation. This method consists of five stages, namely communication, planning quickly, modeling the design quickly, making prototypes, and submitting the system or software to the user or users to be tested using the black box testing method.Findings/result: The results of this study resulted in an application for processing customer service questionnaires from STMIK PalComTech, to simplify and shorten UPT-PM staff in preparing reports on the results of the questionnaire recap, reporting and distributing the results of the questionnaire recap of the Head of UPT-PM.Originality/value/state of the art: The system testing technique used in this study is black box testing, this testing technique focuses on the functional specifications of the software, this test is also used to find errors in the system, for example interface errors, performance errors, incorrect or missing functions

The Evaluation of Substrates and Trichoderma SP. Isolates for Cellulase Production

As higher interest was on the lignocellulose-based or second generation bioethanol production, the research was then more focused on the production of cellulase, especially on the domestic enzyme. Trichoderma sp. is considered as one of the most efficient producer of cellulase. This study was conducted to investigate the performance of Trichoderma sp. on a variety of substrates to produce cellulase. Three types of substrate variations and three types of Trichoderma sp. were used in this experiment. The substrate used were wheat bran, rice bran and oil palm empty fruit bunches (EFBs), whereas Trichoderma sp. isolates were encoded as T004, T051 and T063. Production of cellulase was made by solid fermentation for 7 days. The analysis of cellulase activity was done by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) method for filter paper assay. The results showed that the type of substrate affected the performance of Trichoderma sp. All types of fungus produced cellulase on wheat bran substrate with activity of 0.52 FPU /ml for T004, 0.23 FPU/ml for T051 and 0.27 FPU /ml for T063. With the rice bran substrate and EFBs, only T004 could produce cellulase and the enzyme activity analyzed were 0.08 FPU /ml and 0.008 FPU/ml respectively. Optimation of the buffer addition on enzyme extraction process produces the highest activity 0.85 FPU/mL for T004 with wheat bran substrate.