Abstract
•Potassium persulfate is a good oxidative pretreatment reagent.•The highest enzymatic digestibility of 91% was achieved.•Persulfate based oxidation significantly altered the structural features.
Oxidation induced by potassium persulfate was evaluated as an economic substitute for the Fenton-like reaction for the purpose of rice straw pretreatment in terms of temperature (80–140°C), potassium persulfate concentration (5–100mM) and process time (0.5–3h), an optimal pretreatment condition was identified: 120°C for 2 h with 75mM potassium persulfate concentration and yielded 91% enzymatic digestibility using 25.2FPU/g of biomass. Crystallinity index, SEM and SEM-EDS analyses revealed that biomass was indeed disrupted and components like silica were exposed. All this suggested that this persulfate-based pretreatment method, which is distinctively advantageous in terms of effectiveness and economics, can indeed be a competitive option.