Pretreatment of biomass to alter their recalcitrant structures is an essential step to obtain
high yield of products via bioconversion processes. In this study, main emphasis was to
compare the results evaluated in terms of total reducing sugars (TRS) yield after acid and
hot water pre-treatment process performed with laboratory scale equipment using
different lignocellulosic biomass. The biomass chosen for this purpose i.e. sugarcane
bagasse and bamboo were collected from Guwahati, Assam and their physico-chemical
characteristics were examined using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared
(FTIR) spectroscopy and thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA) including proximate and ultimate
analysis. Crystalinity of the biomass used was observed to be 33.15% and 31.29% for
sugarcane bagasse and bamboo respectively. Hot water and dilute acid pretreatment allows
selective solubility of hemicellulose which improves the accessibility of enzymes for
cellulose hydrolysis. The highest yield of TRS was observed at run order 8 for both acid and
hot water pretreatment (23.49 and 26.50 gL1) with respect to sugarcane bagasse. But, the
pretreatment results obtained for bamboo was slightly different to that of sugarcane
bagasse. The highest yield of TRS was obtained at run order 8 for acid (15.6 gL1) and run
order 10 for hot water (17.98 gL1) pretreatment respectively. Irrespective of biomass type,
hot water pretreatment process produced more TRS than acid pretreatment process.