Efficiency Determination of Water Lily (Eichhornia crassipes) Fiber Delignification by Electrohydrolysis Using Different Electrolytes

Nowadays, biomass use has increased due to it being the most abundant raw material on the planet, and treating it is a difficult task, as a result of the number of existing methods and the applications’ diversification. This research work shows the results obtained using different delignification methods (physical and chemical) on water lily ((Eichhornia crassipes) fiber lignocellulosic biomass including a seldom exploited method, known as “electrohydrolysis” in order to determinate the removal efficiency of lignin and hemicellulose. The characterization of the physicochemical and morphological properties of the water lily (Eichhornia crassipes) fiber before and after the pretreatments were applied were by means of Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and optical microscopy (OM). The results of FT-IR show a significant decrease in the bands associated with lignin and hemicellulose. By XRD, it was determined that the crystallinity of the cellulose increased by 60% for the treated samples with respect to the reference, and an increase in the surface roughness of the samples was observed by OM. In conclusion, it was determined that electrochemistry delignification is an efficient, environmentally friendly methodology to remove the soluble sugars, opening the possibility to use the water lily (Eichhornia crassipes) fiber to produce a green concrete.