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 balance was performed to determine the efficiency of each pretreatment condition. The mass balance was expressed as the difference in the sample mass before and after pretreatment, considering the moisture content of each sample.