Lignin Purification from Mild Alkaline Sugarcane Extract via Membrane Filtration

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is interesting but it needs some improvements before publication.

1) Please improve your introduction by explaining the importance of the hydrolysis liquor purification. Is it important for fermentation processes? What type of microorganisms are more prone to be affected by the phenolics or carboxylic acids?

2) There are too many figures in this paper. You can combine most of the graphs according to what they show, for example the retention rate of the sugars, or the bar graphs for the phenolics.

3) Why have you not studied the reuse of the membranes?

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. We tried to answer to your questions

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript of Thi-Thanh Pham et al., investigated the separation of lignin (lignin monomers) and hemicelluloses from alkaline treated sugar cane bagasse (SCB) by applying membrane filtration. The utilization of waste streams and/or streams resulting from food/feed industry is currently hot topic (especially SBC). Therefore this paper deserves recognition in this field of research. The approach of the authors is well performed, the article is well written and the applied methodology merits publication in Clean Technologies. However, after reading the manuscript I have some minor comments which ought to be addressed before publication:

-    -     Please be consistent with the use of units in the manuscript. Sometimes a spacing is used between number and unit, sometimes not (considering the same parameter even, e.g., “°C)

-    -     Once an abbreviation is used in the text alongside its full name, only mention the abbreviation from that point onwards (e.g., SCB).

-  -       Please refer to section 2.3 when the (bio-)chemical composition of SCB is provided (Table 1).

-   -      What kind of temperature control was provided in the filtration experiment? Normally a hot plate cannot provide specific temperatures?

-   -      What was the temperature of the oven’s for both HPLC analyses?

-    -     The authors mention that the experiments have only been conducted once. However, do the authors have any idea regarding the standard deviation of a typical experiment? Please add this to the manuscript (to give the readers an idea about the reproducibility of the experiments).

-     -    Adjust the scale of y-axes in Figure 7 and 8 to facilitate reading. Also Figure 17 (xylose and arabinose).

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. We tried to answer to your questions

Author Response File: Author Response.docx