Pretreatment of rice straw with recycled ionic liquids by phase‐separation process for low‐cost biorefinery

An efficient ionic liquids (ILs) recycle technology will increase the economic viability of lignocellulosic biorefinery. The availability of recycling 1‐butyl‐3‐methylimidazolium chloride for rice straw (RS) pretreatment was conducted. The kosmotropic salt K3PO4 (TKP) solution was used as antisolvent for cellulose precipitation and forming a three‐phase system consisting of biomass, ILs‐rich, and salt‐rich phases. The upper ILs phase and the bottom TKP phase were recycled without additional purification, which significantly simplifies the process for recovering ILs. Subsequently, the RS pretreated with multiple reusing ILs (RPRS) were investigated by components analysis, structure evolution, enzymatic hydrolysis, and fermentation experiments. The results showed that unpurified reusing ILs led to further delignification and improvement of enzyme accessibility of the pretreated RS. The reducing sugar yield of RS pretreated with 8th reusing IL (8th RPRS) could still reach 98.9%, and the ethanol and succinic acid concentrations achieved 91.9 and 29.3 g/L by simultaneous saccharification and cofermentation. The present study demonstrated that the ILs recovered by phase‐separation process could be used for RS pretreatment, and achieving high titer ethanol fermentation. Schematic diagram of RS pretreatment with recycled ILs for biorefinery.