Improvement of lignin yield and purity from corncob in the presence of steam explosion and liquid hot pressured alcoholElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c5ra12452b

Non-food biomass such as corncob is a very abundant and promising feedstock for sustainable energy production in China. Many studies have focused on overcoming the barrier of saccharification of corncob. However, lignin was not well exploited as the renewable aromatic resource in nature since a simple single protocol usually cannot facilitate bio-recalcitrance or advanced methods (ionic liquid etc. ) hardly met the economic viability on a plant scale. Here we provided an easy combined process which could reap pure, high-yield and low molecular weight lignin. Moreover, cellulose and hemicellulose were easy digested into value-added products (xylose and glucose). The results showed that: (1) the lignin rich fraction was pure and of a high-yield, main linkages was cleaved during the combined process; (2) hemicellulose was utterly removed and transformed into xylose; (3) the cellulose rich fraction was easy to digestion enzymatically and the glucose conversion was 95.7% of the theoretical value. Non-food biomass such as corncob is a very abundant and promising feedstock for sustainable energy production in China.