Study of “napier grass” delignification for production of cellulosic derivatives

► Pulping process with calcium oxide. ► Bleaching technology using hydrogen peroxide. ► A lignocellulosic material alternative: “napier grass”. Recently, much research on the evaluation of new cellulose sources has been developed. In this context, a promising source is “napier grass”, which contains 30.40% lignin, 36.34% cellulose, and 34.12% hemicellulose. In this work, conditions for the delignification of “napier grass” in the laboratory were studied by using calcium oxide (CaO) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The best pulping conditions were 9.00% CaO for a period of 2.73h, which resulted in 74.99% delignification and 66.58% cellulose. The best conditions for the bleaching process were pH 12 and hydrogen peroxide at concentration of 4.2% for 6h, at a temperature of 40°C, which gave 90.98% delignification and 99.21% cellulose. The analyses were performed by using weight percent.