Production of cellulosic ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass represents a potential alternative to the petroleum fuel due to its renewable nature and sustainable availability. Currently, the major strategy used for cellulosic ethanol production includes three main steps i.e., biomass pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis and ethanol fermentation [
1,
2]. The enzymatic hydrolysis contributes significantly to the cost of cellulosic ethanol and from the process economics perspective, the improvement in the enzymatic hydrolysis step is a prerequisite [
3,
4]. The main obstacles for enzymatic hydrolysis are low rate of reaction, high cost of enzyme, low product concentration and lack of understanding of cellulase kinetics on lignocellulosic substrates [
5,
6]. One way to overcome this problem is to operate the enzymatic hydrolysis using high insoluble solid consistency [
7-
9]. However, the saccharification reaction at high insoluble solid consistency will have to encounter the problems of increased viscosity, higher energy requirement for mixing, shear inactivation of cellulases, and poor heat transfer due to rheological properties of dense fibrous suspension [
9,
10].
Interestingly in fed-batch enzymatic hydrolysis such problems could be avoided by adding the substrate and/or enzymes gradually to maintain the low level of viscosity [
11]. The fed-batch enzymatic saccharification process has several other economic advantages over conventional batch process such as lower capital cost due to reduced volume, lower operating costs and lower down-stream processing cost due to higher product concentration [
6,
7]. There are several reports on fed-batch enzymatic saccharification which mainly deal with the development of appropriate kinetic models for mechanistic description of the phenomena [
9,
12,
13]. However, the reports on process operation, optimization and control for fed-batch enzymatic saccharification are scarce [
14]. Till date, the strategies used for fed-batch enzymatic saccharification are categorized into three main groups i.e., (i) to recycle enzyme; (ii) fed-batch SSF to mitigate inhibitory effect and (iii) fed-batch saccharification to increase the cumulative substrate in a reactor [
7]. Here, the present study falls within the third category and our main emphasis was to enhance the total solid content and sugar concentration, which eventually resulted in higher ethanol production.
The experimental data on cellulose hydrolysis by cellulases point to various bottlenecks that decrease the rate of conversion. Mathematical modeling of the enzymatic hydrolysis process is an important tool for analyzing these bottlenecks [
5]. Use of mathematical modeling can lead to several advantages viz. the effect of feeding profiles on sugar conversion can be evaluated apriori, kinetics of the hydrolysis process can be studied and process simulations can be made to understand the kinetic regimes. Recently, Hodge and colleagues [
7] have used model based fed-batch approach to develop a feeding profile for the fed-batch enzymatic saccharification, while, Morales-Rodriguez and coworkers [
14] used a modeling approach to reduce the amount of enzyme during the fed-batch enzymatic saccharification.
The present study deals with the development of the feeding profile and a mathematical model for the understanding of the enzymatic saccharification kinetics in a stirred tank reactor (STR). Moreover, the hydrolysates obtained after batch and fed-batch enzymatic hydrolysis has subsequently been fermented to ethanol, and an overall comparison between batch and fed-batch process has been presented.