With many environmental benefits, corn-based ethanol has been widely used in recent years. Cellulosic ethanol, however, will require pretreatment to break down lingo-cellulosic structures prior to fermentation. Among all the pretreatment reagents which can be used, ammonia has been shown to be one of the most effective, because it can readily delignify, swell, and preserve the cellulose. Previous work evaluated the effectiveness of the LMAA pretreatment method. The purpose of this study was to determine optimal conditions (i.e. highest glucose yield) using the LMAA pretreatment process. In this experiment, corn stover was prepared with different moisture contents (20%, 50%, 80% wt) and particle sizes (9-30 mesh, 30-144 mesh). Corn stover was ammoniated at 20 psi for 30 minutes. Ammoniated corn stover then was subjected to different incubation times (24h, 75h, and 144h) under different temperatures (20C, 70C, 120C). After that, compositional analyses, including ash content, solids content, structural carbohydrates, and lignin content, were conducted. Enzymatic digestibility tests were also conducted. Results from this study will be used to improve the efficiency of pretreatment processing
