Lignocellulose pretreatment results in production of hydrolysate consisting of sugars and inhibitors. Previous reports have shown the viability of nanofiltration (NF) of lignocellulosic hydrolysate for simultaneous sugar concentration and inhibitors removal. However, the complexity of real hydrolysate results in severe membrane fouling which greatly hinders the further application of NF in treating biomass hydrolysate. In this investigation, conditioning of real rice straw hydrolysate from dilute acid pretreatment was conducted by three methods (sedimentation, microfiltration (MF) and activated carbon (AC) adsorption) in order to reduce subsequent NF membrane fouling. Results showed that the turbidity, suspended substance (SS) and particle size of SS of the hydrolysate considerably decreased after these three conditioning methods. Only AC adsorption, however, exhibited best performance in terms of increasing the volume reduction ratio (VRR) and decreasing the membrane fouling during NF filtration of rice straw hydrolysate, demonstrating the effectiveness of AC adsorption for hydrolysate conditioning. Further experiments confirmed that removal of phenolics and pigments, the two dominating foulants during NF process, by AC adsorption were most likely responsible for its superior performance compared to sedimentation and MF.

木质纤维素预处理产生由糖和抑制剂组成的水解产物。先前的报道显示了木质纤维素水解产物的纳滤（NF）在同时浓缩糖和去除抑制剂方面的可行性。然而，实际水解产物的复杂性导致严重的膜污染，这极大地阻碍了NF在生物质水解产物的处理中的进一步应用。在这项研究中，通过三种方法（沉淀，微滤（MF）和活性炭（AC）吸附）对来自稀酸预处理的真正稻草水解产物进行了调节，以减少随后的NF膜结垢。结果表明，这三种调节方法后，水解产物的浊度，悬浮物（SS）和SS的粒径均大大降低。然而，就增加稻草水解产物的体积减少率（VRR）和减少NF过滤过程中的膜污染而言，只有AC吸附表现出最好的性能，这表明AC吸附在水解产物调节方面的有效性。进一步的实验证实，与沉降法和MF法相比，通过AC吸附去除NF过程中两种主要的污垢酚醛和颜料很可能是其优越性能的原因。