The steam explosion was performed at the Federal University of
Paraná (Curitiba, PR, Brazil) using a 10-L stainless steel reactor. A
600-g sample of untreated elephant grass containing 10% (w/w)
moisture was pretreated at various times and temperatures as summarised in Table 1. The pretreatment severity was calculated according to (Overend et al., 1987). After pretreatment, a mass bal- ance was performed to determine the efficiency of each pretreat- ment condition. The mass balance was expressed as the difference in the sample mass before and after pretreatment, con- sidering the moisture content of each sample.